Type O Negative
by quothme
Summary: When the Cullens move to Forks, Bella thinks that the creepy new kid, Edward, has freaky yellow eyes. And that he's insufferably rude. Good thing he's in love with someone else. An AU dark comedy.
1. Chapter 1: Freaky yellow eyes

**------------| Type O Negative |------------**

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Twilight; it owns me. All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the properties of their respective owners. I am in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story is my homage to the greatest Roswell fanfiction of all time, SPIN by incognito.

**Summary:** When the Cullens move to Forks, Bella suspects that Edward is a superhero because of his "freaky yellow eyes." But she quickly realizes that she's destined to be only his sidekick, and a poor one at that. She's probably the only vampire sidekick ever who faints at the sight of blood. AU, HH (half human…is that even an acronym?)

* * *

I'm a sucker for superheroes with a dark side.

There's something spine-tinglingly compelling about someone who has the power to hurt, maim, and destroy yet who chooses to use that power for good.

But what happens when you find that superhero? Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you've found a superhero who can stop vans with one hand and practically wipe your memory with a single, mind-numbing kiss. The superhero you've been holding out for your whole life.

But then you find that you're only the sidekick, and a particularly lame one, at that. What happens when you find that the superhero has his eye on another heroine? And what if the superhero is really the bad guy?

What happens then?

I'll tell you what happens.

The superhero has to make a choice. Not only between blonde heroine and brunette sidekick; that's an easy one. The superhero has to choose to use his powers for good. To choose between life and death. Kinda like all of us, really.

This is the story of someone with that choice.

Of course, it's not me. I don't count.

Not it.

* * *

In the fourth grade, I read a book about three kids with unusual gray eyes who could move things with their minds because their mothers were exposed to an experimental drug while pregnant. I don't remember the exact plot of the book, but I do remember that one of the kids used his ability to pickpocket the neighbors.

Naturally, I think of this book in eleventh grade when I meet the three Cullens with their weird golden eyes. Maybe they have special freaky powers to go along with their freaky eyes. I can just see the creepiest one, Edward, doing something fiendish with his golden-eyed superpowers.

I am right, of course. But I don't find out how right until later.

* * *

First, the setting. I have lived all but one year of my life in the small town of Forks, a muddy scar on the otherwise beautiful Olympic Peninsula. As a result, I snort when I hear a country song regaling the joys of a small town. Allow me to debunk some of the myths surrounding small town life.

Myth: You don't have to lock your front door. Fact: You do if you don't want to find the neighboring housewife rooting through your pantry looking to borrow a cup of sugar. Myth: The people are friendly. Fact: You walk around like an escaped convict in fear that someone will recognize you and want to make small talk. Myth: There's no waiting list at the local beauty salon. Fact: The ladies of the town (and some of their dogs) have suspiciously similar haircuts.

The point is, if you're not super interested in being sociable, having your neighbors drop by as you're getting out of the shower, and sharing the fashion sense of a poodle, Forks is not for you.

Needless to say, I plan on getting out as soon as I graduate from high school. Angela and I made a pact in ninth grade to go off to college together, preferably somewhere far enough away from Forks that we only visit for the occasional holiday. And preferably somewhere that offers events of higher entertainment value than a Mike Newton party.

Second, the protagonist of our story. This is how I meet Edward Cullen.

It's all over school: there are new kids in town. As you can imagine, in Forks this is a Big Deal. The last new kid to move here was…

You guessed it: me. In seventh grade. And actually, I moved back in seventh grade after a single year with my mom in Phoenix. Tyler and Mike still call me New Girl every so often. They crack themselves up.

But this isn't about me or them. This is about Edward. And how the focus of my life shifted to him.

Three new kids with three pairs of golden eyes. This is what I think when I first see them sitting together in the cafeteria. Of course, this is not what the rest of the student population sees. They are too distracted by the fact that the Cullens are a little more attractive than your average Spartan.

"Oh my gosh," a freshman gushes in the hallway. "Did you see that new boy? He is so hot!"

Yes, she's one of_ those_. By her inflection, I could tell she meant "hott." I keep walking. But the Cullens seem to follow me everywhere. In and between every class, the hive mind buzzes with the following:

(1) What the Cullens are wearing (expensive)  
(2) What the Cullens are saying (nothing)  
(3) What the Cullens are doing (looking hott)

Even the queen bee herself—Rosalie Hale—is discussing the Cullens.

She's all, "I hear they're trouble." She's trying to regain control by casting doubt on the coolness that is the Cullens. Rosalie is never comfortable when someone else is in the spotlight. She is made to shine.

I mean, look at her.

If I wanted to be dramatic, I could say that Rosalie is my perfect foil. She's all blonde-haired and blue-eyed and red-lipped. I'm all dishwater-haired and brown-eyed and chapped-lipped.

But I don't really want to be dramatic. I continue listening to Rosalie.

Rosalie is all, "I hear their foster parents saved them from juvie." I watch her cascading golden hair sway as she speaks to a group of identically-dressed girls in little short skirts.

"Wow. Beautiful _and_ dangerous," says Lauren. She isn't as beautiful as Rosalie but makes up for it by being even meaner. Currently, she's foiling Rosalie's plan to discount the Cullens. She's inciting the cheerleading pack to greater heights of curiosity. That's always the problem with surrounding yourself with a pack of identically-dressed people. Usually, they want to be you, so they will stab you in the back when they see the least opportunity to take your place.

I walk on by. Despite myself, my body drags me to Biology.

Biology is where I meet Edward Cullen. So you can understand why this was inevitable, let me tell you about Biology. Biology is the red-headed step-child of classes. Nothing you do in Biology ever really makes sense, and you wonder how it's part of the established curriculum. Here's what I have against Biology. You often have to:

(1) Interact with others  
(2) Walk around  
(3) Work with foreign substances

Clearly, this is a problem for me because I:

(1) Am anti-social  
(2) Can barely walk  
(3) Faint at the sight of blood or the smell of formaldehyde

P.S. I've found that bulleted lists help organize thoughts for maximum impact. In this case, you should be impacted by the fact that I hate Biology. Did I mention I have a tendency to set my hair on fire? Seriously, that Bunsen fellow should be sued.

After today, I can add another reason to my list: Edward Cullen is in my Biology class.

When I walk in, I see the Greek god with the freaky yellow eyes. Strike one for Edward Cullen: I learned a long time ago that Greek gods aren't worth it. There's one at every school, and you automatically set yourself up for failure by liking him. Unless, of course, you're the school's Greek goddess, which I'm not.

Greek god is sitting at my lab table. This is odd because Mr. Banner learned early on to not subject other students to my table. Hazard to their health and all that. The rash I inadvertently gave Jessica Stanley went away. Eventually. We have not spoken since then, but how is this a bad thing?

Greek god doesn't look at me as I approach, but he gets this weird look on his face as I sit down. And when I say weird, I mean your typical mask of hatred. The look you often see on someone's face when you meet them for the first time. He puts his hand over his mouth. He's going to hurl. This is perfectly normal. Formaldehyde usually has this effect on me, too. Mr. Banner has just wheeled out the frog legs marinating in my favorite substance. I think I'm too distracted by Edward's revulsion to feel my own.

I reach out and pat Edward's hand in sympathy. His hand is properly cold and clammy, given the circumstances.

"It'll get easier," I say. "Once the formaldehyde fries your nasal cavity so that you can't smell anything for the next twelve hours."

Edward jerks his hand away. He stares down at it as though it repulses him. I note that his freaky yellow eyes aren't yellow any more. They are dark brown, almost black.

Mr. Banner is saying something about frog legs. He's probably telling us how to cut them up. Perhaps warning us not to eat them. We are staring at Edward's hand as he moves it slowly and inexorably back toward his body. I'm thinking Millennium Falcon getting pulled in by the Death Star slow. His hand slips beneath the table.

He spends the rest of the period frozen. He's as far away from me as he can be. I spend the next several minutes fuming. My thoughts go like this:

He's probably just sick.  
At least he didn't pass out.  
Greek gods don't pass out.  
Greek gods should stay up in Olympia where they belong.  
Or is that down in Olympia from here?  
I've always hated Greek mythology.  
And Geography.  
Why is there an armadillo in this classroom anyway?

Edward doesn't speak to me. He doesn't help me dissect the frog. The latter is okay; I am used to completing labs alone. The former is not. After all, I had sympathized with him over formaldehyde. I had tried to physically console him. I don't do this for just anyone. Strike two for Edward Cullen.

The bell rings, and he's out of the classroom before I can blink. I stand looking after him in my frog-smeared smock and goggles. Here's another thing to the list of things I hate about Biology: smocks and goggles.

* * *

I plan to ignore him. This is difficult, as Edward is not in school the next day. I watch as females throughout the school wilt. Many of them have clearly spent extra time getting ready this morning in an effort to stand out. Oddly, they all look the same.

They get to school, look each other up and down, and say "I like your hair" when they really mean "Look at mine." I see the word "PINK" across an umpteen number of posteriors. They might as well have a flashing neon arrow inviting people to ogle their butt.

Me, I've worn my best "Ignore Edward Cullen" outfit today: oversized hoodie, baggy jeans, ear phones. But we're all disappointed. That day, Edward Cullen sets some type of record. One day in Forks before he runs away screaming.

Rosalie is pleased. She's all, "I'll bet he got arrested for the fifth time." She'll be less excited when he comes back. You know he's going to come back. I will not keep you in suspense.

I pass the week not thinking about Edward Cullen. I don't think about Edward Cullen when I sit alone in Biology. Or when I catch his brother and sister looking at me in the cafeteria. And certainly not when the first words out of everyone's mouth are "Where's Edward?"

Edward could have his own little illustrated books where you have to find him amid a sea of increasingly bizarre scenarios and activities. Come to think of it, he kinda looks like Waldo with his little bronze bouffant.

Some people ask me specifically where Edward is, as if I know. Some of my Biology classmates are probably thinking "You had to go with the hand pat, did you? You _know_ what that does to people."

Angela the Ninja helps me to continue not thinking about Edward Cullen. On Saturday, I go over to her house to hold the punching bag in her basement. This is the only thing I'm good for when she's sparring.

I call her a ninja, but really it's called karate, and she's been taking it since she was three. She is a very good ninja, although you would not know it by looking at her. She's short with reed-like bones. That is, until she has you in a death grip and could break your spine just by moving her pinky toe.

Her preacher's wife mom frowned on the sport.

"It encourages violence," she said. "You'll get into all sorts of fights."

Naturally, Angela worked her way to black belt. Her mother stopped complaining after Angela broke some frat guy's nose in Port Angeles. He was trying to hit on her.

He failed.

She hit on him.

It's a good thing I wasn't there. Apparently, the guy's nose gushed blood. My fainting would have been a liability in the situation.

So here I stand behind Angela's red punching bag, trying not to fall over as she delivers yet another roundhouse kick. I encourage her by interpreting what the punching bag is saying to me.

"This punching bag thinks you kick like a girl!"

My teeth rattle as her kick connects.

"He didn't even feel that one."

My entire body shakes.

"I can't hear you!" (Yeah, I don't really know what I was going for there, either, but the line seems to work in movies.)

I fall on my butt. Angela provides butt pads for this purpose. She feels guilty about knocking me down all the time. Iron fists and a soft heart—an unbeatable combination. I'm her perfect sparring partner. It doesn't matter if she knocks me down; I knock myself down all the time. Said in the style of Dustin Hoffman from _Rain Man_, I'm an excellent faller.

When Angela's done pummeling the bag, we talk for a while. We talk about our various college options and where we feel like going today.

Today, Angela is feeling tropical. She's all Hawaii and Florida. Normally, I'm all Vermont and New York and Timbuktu. Today, I mention the University of Washington for the first time in the two years we've been discussing this topic.

Angela's eyes go wide, and she blushes. She blushes because Angela is one of the few not on the Edward bandwagon. She's on the Ben bandwagon instead. And Ben wants to go to the University of Washington.

For some reason, I'm uncomfortable that she's so clearly considering UW. I was just throwing it out there. I wasn't serious. It's too close to Forks.

* * *

On Monday, Edward Cullen is back at school.

I figure this out quickly. It isn't hard. What clues me in is that Forks High is panicked. Girls are running home to change; PINK is in flagrant display; people are in the bathroom throwing up that stupid breakfast muffin.

And, of course, I clue in further when Edward himself is in Biology. Granted, there have been some musical chairs that would be confusing to someone less clever than I. Edward sits at Rosalie's lab table. Lauren sits at mine.

I don't know how he broke up that little club—wait, scratch that. Edward probably just stood and looked vaguely at the wall behind Lauren's head until she melted into a puddle and slithered across the floor to my table. Alternatively, Rosalie could have taken one look at who was standing in line for her table and could have stared down Lauren herself.

Either way, Lauren was a goner. There was no way that she could have _not_ ended up at my table. Lauren is now glaring twin death rays at me as I enter the room. She hopes I myself will melt; perhaps cower and go push myself into a threesome at Mike and Tyler's table. But Lauren's blue eyes don't have freaky powers, so I slide into my customary seat next to her.

"Swan."

"Mallory."

Pleasantries out of the way, I turn my attention elsewhere. Slightly in front of me and to my right, I watch Edward's back for a second. It is covered in a gray pea coat. He is leaning toward Rosalie. And yep, he's speaking to her. His voice carries. Everyone in the room is holding his or her breath to hear it.

"I didn't get a chance to introduce myself last week. I'm Edward Cullen."

He is proper. And pleasant. Obviously, he isn't talking to me, the person who pats the hands of people she barely knows.

The other girls in the class let out a collective sigh—the sigh felt around the school. In their seats elsewhere, other girls not in this room sigh, not knowing why, simply understanding that something crucial has slipped through their fingers.

Edward Cullen has made his choice. Edward Cullen has just joined the Rosalie Hale fan club with the rest of the Forks High males.

How cliché.

Strike three for Edward Cullen.

* * *

After class, I stroll by Rosalie and her clique.

She's all, "Edward is deep. He's so misunderstood."

She has inside information now. She has him hooked. She no longer thinks he's delinquent.

Unfortunately for Edward, there's Emmett. Rosalie and Emmett have been dating for a majority of their lives. There's a rule that the best-looking guy and girl in the school end up together. Rosalie and Emmett fit the mold perfectly—she's head cheerleader, he's starting quarterback.

But Emmett isn't your average jock. Don't get me wrong, he's big, sweaty, and cocky. Despite that, you can't hate him. Case in point, he's currently threading through the hall in slow-motion, probably re-enacting one of his recent touchdowns.

And yes, he's providing his own commentary in an absurdly loud stage whisper.

"McCarty plows through a line of brawny defenders."

This as he edges carefully past a gaggle of freshman girls.

"He fakes out the league's top safety with a mind-blowing spin move."

This as he pivots slowly on one foot around a band nerd clutching a flute.

"His eyes are on the prize."

He does an elaborately slow rendition of the Running Man. At the end of the hall, Rosalie eyes him stonily.

"Two more steps and…TOUCHDOWN!"

He stands in front of Rosalie with his arms raised, making that hissing fake crowd noise. Rosalie's expression is annoyed, but her dancing eyes betray that her ire is mostly for show.

Rosalie doesn't deserve him. She deserves someone more like Edward. Hm, I wonder what will happen now that Emmett is no longer the best-looking guy in school.

* * *

Sometimes, my life seems to pass at light speed, like cars zooming by at night on the interstate. Headlights and taillights blend together until you don't know where one car begins and another ends. You know that cars are coming and going, that their passing has a start and finish, but all you see is a constant flow of light.

The next month passes in this type of blur. I attend lackluster classes, wade through faceless peers in the halls, and complete mindless homework. I'm merely an observer in my own life, and I'm observing alone. Usually, I have Angela to keep me company, but her presence is becoming increasingly erratic. Of course, I wholeheartedly encourage her to go sit at Ben's table. I could follow, but Ben sits with Mike and crew.

My only entertainment is watching the Edward Cullen dance. I call it such because I don't know how else to describe his bizarre behavior. I find myself oddly fascinated by the fact that, should he ever find himself in close proximity to me or—God forbid—alone with me, I literally can't count to ten before he makes his escape.

I want nothing more than to ignore him. But that's difficult when I see his nostrils flare when he passes me in the halls. Or when he glowers at me for backing into him by the communal sink in Biology.

I don't kid myself. I know that his actions can't possibly be an opposite and equal reaction to anything I've done. I'm sure this is some sort of cosmic coincidence. Usually I look around after one of his dramatic exits to see a flash of Rosalie's hair. Or I hear her laugh.

I go back to sleepwalking through my life.

A gleam in Mr. Banner's eye draws me from my stupor. It reminds me of the gleam he had last semester when we did blood-typing. Naturally, I am leery of this new gleam.

"I have a fun project for you," he says.

Fine.

"That will require some time after class for the next several weeks."

Still fine.

"You get to choose a topic."

Can do.

"And work with your partner to do research and write a paper."

And there's the snag. Lauren and I eye each other. We're sitting in identical positions at our table, our arms crossed. This is how we've sat for the past month while we've _not_ worked on assignments together.

I think the topic that Lauren will choose is how many bottles of peroxide her hair requires before it's the perfect shade of blonde. She thinks the topic I'll choose is whether there's a specific gene that makes people so clumsy they're almost disabled.

Okay, I don't really know what she thinks. I just have this uncanny ability to write someone else's mental dialogue for them. I'm good at fight scenes. Name-calling. Down-putting. For example, in my head, Lauren is reacting to my quip about her bleach blonde hair.

"_Maybe you should get some crip plates for your car," she says._

"_Maybe you should buy me some sunglasses to spare me from the glare of your hair," I say._

"_You'll be the first person in the history of Forks to fail gym," she says._

"_You'll be the first person in the history of Forks to die from bleach in the brain," I say._

Mr. Banner continues, oblivious to the conversation in my head.

"Let's shake things up," he says. I'm listening. I could give someone a good shaking right now. Perhaps Lauren.

"Rather than have you work with your same partner, I'm going to draw new partners out of a hat."

Uh oh.

The class groans. This does not dampen Mr. Banner's enthusiasm. He pulls out a magician's black top hap. He's obviously put a lot of thought into this. I watch as Mr. Banner pulls names out of the hat. He reads off the little bits of paper as they magically appear.

"Lauren and Mike."

Look at me dodging two bullets for the price of one.

"Rosalie and James."

Ha. That's great. James is the president of the Rosalie Hale fan club. A little odd, that one, but good for him getting his Rosalie fix.

"Edward and Cassie."

Wait, what?

Cassie? Inside, I'm dancing. I'm not partnered with Mike or Edward. Things are going my way.

"Bella and Jonathan."

Okay. I can handle Jonathan. He's a jock, but I'll do all the work on this project anyway. I look around hopefully for Jonathan. I don't see him. This is not the greatest of signs.

A girl in the front raises her hand.

"Cassie is out with mono."

That explains her absence.

"And so is Jonathan."

That explains his.

There are a few giggles. The class understands what this means.

Mono is probably the most mortifying illness ever. If you'd like, you can get mono by sharing straws, toothbrushes, or food from the same plate. But the best way to get mono is to do lots and lots of kissing. Smooching. Face sucking.

As Cassie and Jonathan no doubt discovered.

Mr. Banner frowns. "Do you know how long they'll be out?"

"Few weeks?" The girl shrugs. She pretends not to know anything about mono as though she hadn't been suspiciously absent herself for a month last semester.

Mr. Banner has a plan. He looks down at the slips of paper arranged neatly on his desk. He moves a couple around.

"Edward and Bella," he says. "You're a team."

Neither Edward nor I clap in appreciation. We don't even look at each other or make any move to discuss next steps on the project. The bell rings, and I walk out of class. As I'm out the door, Mike walks past me with a gleam in his own eye. He has a magician's top hat cocked rakishly on his head. I smile at the thought that Mr. Banner is down one top hat with which to afflict people with hopelessly incompatible partners.

I stop smiling when I hear someone talking to Mr. Banner.

"Would it be possible for James and me to switch partners, sir?"

I know this voice, and, despite myself, I think I feel my heart drop into my stomach. Although why I'm surprised Edward is trying to get out of being partners with me, I don't know. I stop just past the door and scoot over until I'm out of the main stream. I wonder if Mr. Banner will like being called sir. I hope he thinks Edward is making fun of him. Perhaps he'll give Edward detention for being so rude.

"It's just a couple of weeks. Do you have a legitimate reason to switch partners?"

"Edward and I have a really great topic," a second voice bargains. Yeah. It's called an in-depth exploration of human anatomy, Rosalie. As demonstrated, I'm very good at coming up with Biology topics. Mr. Banner should put my topics in a magician's top hat. If only he still had one.

In my mind, I can picture Edward and Rosalie standing earnestly in front of Mr. Banner, their beautiful faces and eyes free of guile as they try to work their combined beautiful person voodoo. Will Mr. Banner cave?

"James and Bella are already gone. It would be unfair to switch partners on them like this."

Right now, this is what I could do: I could reach out and grab James' arm. He's passing me as we speak, looking cold and hard as always. But his eyes are unusually full of life. I could grab his blonde ponytail. I could march us both back in to Mr. Banner and obviate his argument.

But I don't.

Why? There are two obvious reasons.

Number one: James isn't really the type of guy who would just brush off a ponytail grab. He's a wrestler; he'd probably do some funky move and snap my wrist in the process. Therefore, I don't mess with James. Nobody messes with James, particularly to prevent him from getting what he wants. Which in this case definitely includes Rosalie.

Number two: So far, nothing about Edward has convinced me to want to acquiesce to any of his requests. Instead, I walk away to my locker.

At least this assignment promises to be interesting. It might amuse me to see the lengths he'll go to avoid working on this assignment with me.

* * *

Fast-forward through the time in which nothing interesting happens. Not, of course, that I consider time in which I happen to interact with Edward "interesting." You try living in Forks and see how quickly you categorize anything new as "interesting." You try it.

It's lunch now, so I'm in the lunch line.

"We should probably start on our Bio assignment."

When I hear this comment, which seems to be directed at me, I'm shocked by two things: (1) I've never seen Edward in the lunch line before and (2) Edward has never spoken to me before. I have been studiously ignoring him in Bio class since we received our assignment.

"Oh, I've already started," I tell him.

Edward blinks down at his tray of food. I think he cut in line to talk to me. Behind us, Tyler is giving him the evil eye. No one comes between Tyler and his food. Particularly on pizza days like today.

"Do you want to discuss your topic in more detail?"

"Sure." I grab a celery stick.

Normally, Tyler tackles anyone who cuts in front of him.

"How about today after school?"

Wait for it…

"Okay."

No movement from behind Edward. While he woodenly grabs some pizza, I peek over his shoulder.

I'm floored.

Tyler is shaking it off. He's mumbling something to Mike and Eric. They all scowl at Edward, but they go back to loading their trays. This is weird. They're giving him space. They're pretending to peruse the same four options in front of them. They're stacking up the whole line behind them in a tangle of elbows and legs.

My eyes shift, and the person in front of me comes back into focus. Edward is looking at my chin. He's just asked me a question.

My brain catches up and fills me in: "Where and when would you like to meet?" He's being proper. And pleasant. Strange that he's speaking to me. This is not going according to plan. I have a plan for this Biology project, and it doesn't include Edward.

I grab a pudding cup.

"The diner. At 4:00." I say flatly. Note my enthusiasm. I doubt he'll show.

Edward and I part ways.

Tyler, Mike, and Eric give Edward one final round of stink eye and pounce on the pizza.

Despite myself, I watch Edward's stiff shoulders as he walks back to his customary table.

* * *

We don't make it to the diner at 4:00 p.m. At least, not today.

Classes are out at 3:30 p.m. At 3:35 p.m., I'm wrestling with Nellie's handle. I call my truck Nellie because then you can say "Whoa" with it, making Nellie feel like she's going fast.

Feel being the operative word.

In some ways, Nellie is made for me. I could take her bowling into a row of trees, and she would probably just mow them all down. I might even get a perfect strike. But there's this little thing about the handle on the driver's side door. You have to make it click just right before you can open it. On most days, I do fine.

Despite myself, I look across the lot where Edward and his siblings are getting into his Volvo.

Today, my hands are shaking a little. Could it be because I'm nervous? Yeah, I'm nervous that I won't ever get this door open and that I'll stand out here and freeze.

I try a different angle on the handle. That does it: I hear the little click I need.

At the same time, I hear something else I don't need. It's the sound of screaming tires and a horn. It's too close for my comfort. I whirl, and my vision is filled with Tyler Crowley's blue van. It's sliding toward me on the smallest patch of ice left in the parking lot.

I think: Sun, you've let me down.

I'd like to say my life flashed before my eyes. But all I can really see is the disappointed look in my mother's eyes when I told her I'd be moving back to Forks.

I have just enough time to say "Oh" and close my eyes. For a second, I feel something hard and cold pressed up against my body. There is a horrible crunch as Tyler's van impacts Nellie.

But I don't feel anything. I no longer feel cold. And I don't feel crunched.

Tyler's van has stopped a few feet from me. If I want to be dramatic, I could say that it has stopped a few inches from my nose. But I don't.

And I'm on the ground. Like I said, I'm an excellent faller.

I stand up. For some reason, I feel like I've missed something. For some reason, I look over at the silver Volvo. Edward's siblings are poised at his fender. How rude, let me introduce you now. They are Alice and Jasper.

Alice's and Jasper's freaky yellow eyes are staring at me. Edward's eyes are not. I assume he's in the car. No excitement here. He's probably fiddling with his radio. Nothing to see.

I'm surrounded by a mob of screaming high schoolers. Tyler's head is popping out of his passenger side window.

"Sorry Bella sorry Bella sorry Bella sorry," he's saying.

"Bella, your head," says Mike Newton.

I see what he means. Something is dripping into my right eye. I raise my hand to feel this something. My stomach already knows what it is. It's churning in preparation.

As I draw my hand down, I notice that a panel of Tyler's van is mangled in a strangely recognizable pattern. A panel that didn't touch Nellie. As I start to pass out at the sight of my own blood on my index finger, I think: What are handprints doing in the side of Tyler's car?

The world goes black, but don't worry. There are more than enough people around to catch me.


	2. Chapter 2: Pirates and ninjas

**------------| Type O Negative, **_continued_** |------------**

_

* * *

_

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I'd know the sound of a heart monitor anywhere. No surprise, I'm in a hospital. Probably in _my_ room. I've been at the Forks medical center so often that I can pick my room out of a line-up of nearly identical hospital rooms. If I opened my eyes, I could look for the personalized touches I've added over the years. Like the dent in the drywall after my initial foray with crutches ended with me driving one into the wall. Or the permanently bent mini-blind I grabbed to try and break my fall toward the wall.

But I'm not quite awake yet, I don't think, so I don't open my eyes. Instead, I listen to the nearby voices. They are very quiet and floaty.

Fiendish plots are afoot.

"How did this happen?" I dub this voice Ren.

"She hit her head." And this one Stimpy.

"I'll check her for a concussion, then."

"Can you stop the bleeding?" Stimpy's voice is strained, like he's clenching his teeth in pain. This is not fair. After all, I'm the one with the bleeding, aching head.

"Why don't you go back to school? I'll handle this. Her father will be here shortly."

I think I go back to sleep. Maybe I was never awake. Ren and Stimpy continue talking, but their voices are higher, like chipmunks.

"We may have to operate."

"You're right. Frontal lobotomy."

I distrust where this is going.

"We should probably take out her medulla oblongata."

"Or do an appendectomy."

"Or a colonoscopy."

"That'll fix her right up."

Before I can respectfully decline, darkness claims me.

* * *

Three days later, Tyler Crowley is carrying my books to Bio class for me. I have my own personal man servant now. Apparently, all it takes to convince him to be my man servant is to let him nearly run me over with his car. Actually, it was either this or let him take me to prom. Having my books carried is the lesser of evils. Several evils, actually.

I negotiated like a pro.

"Prom?"

Can't dance.

"Homecoming?"

Still can't dance.

"Mike's party this weekend?"

See above.

"Carry your books?"

No.

Out of desperation, Tyler takes that as a "Yes." Now, I'm marching stiffly through the halls behind him on our way to the Bio classroom. He's walking in front of me, clearing a path.

Edward is standing by my table when we arrive, talking to Lauren about something. Tyler glares at him and puts my books down on my table, a little too firmly. Lauren and Edward continue talking. They don't look at us. Tyler stomps off.

I sit down in my chair and flip open my Bio book. Edward interjects an appropriate "Hm" every so often in response to Lauren's story. It has something to do with a party this weekend. At a lull in their conversation, he immediately turns to me.

"Would you like to work on our project today?"

"Sure," I say. Flip, go the pages of my Biology book.

"Same time, same place?"

"Sure," I repeat without looking up. It's very important that I get to today's chapter before the class starts. Edward nods once and heads back to Rosalie.

Lauren is put out after the purpose of his unexpected jaunt to this side of the room is revealed. But then she turns to me and smiles.

"I was just telling Edward that Mike's having a killer party this weekend," she purrs. I look at her out of the corner of my eye, and I see her overly white teeth gleaming. "You should come. It's a costume party."

"Hm," I say, noncommittally. Mike does throw some killer parties. But costumes aren't really how I roll.

* * *

It's 3:45 p.m., and I'm waiting on Edward to pick up where we left off the other day. This time preferably without any nearby vans spiraling out of control. A refreshing change.

I feel invigorated to be alive. I feel magnanimous. I may actually allow Edward Cullen to help me with our Biology assignment. I'm already at the diner, but Edward is not here because I'm early. I've already ordered my garden burger, paid, and have my Biology notes splayed out on the table.

See how clear I'm being about the fact that this isn't a date?

I'm scribbling furiously on a sheet of ruled paper when Edward arrives. A flash of silver distracts me from the report outline I'm making, and I look up to see Edward getting out of his Volvo.

When he steps into the diner, he's completely out of place. He looks like he's never been to a diner before in his life. His hands are deep in his pockets, and he's wrapped in his pea coat with the collar turned up.

Consider for a moment: Where would Edward look _in_ place? Here are my theories:

(1) Standing in a mall enticing unsuspecting young women into an Abercrombie  
(2) Lying on the pages of a glossy magazine  
(3) Posing for an oversized statue at the center of a temple designed by a modern architect

Instead, he's standing in a dumpy Forks diner looking down at me.

"How's your head?" he asks. I frown. I didn't think he'd noticed.

"Fine," I say automatically. I'm so used to answering this particular question that I once bought a shirt that said "I'm fine" on it in bold letters. They may have also been glittery, but I tried to ignore that part in favor of the symbolism. I stopped wearing the shirt immediately when Mike and Tyler came up with creative questions having nothing to do with my health that the shirt also, unfortunately, answered.

"I heard about what happened," Edward says. I cock my head slightly at his choice of the word "heard." Something's bugging me about this, but I can't yet put my finger on it.

"I'm sorry," he says as he looks at the Spongebob Squarepants band aid on my forehead. I think: _Handprints. _Handprints are what's bothering me.

"Don't be," I say. "It wasn't your fault."

"Hm," he says. He's doing my non-committal thing, which is very interesting because I know that _Hm_ can also be translated as "I don't really agree, but I'm not in the mood to argue." He scrapes out the chair next to me and sits down.

"I'm actually a pro at surviving freak accidents," I say.

"You've had more than one?" He's frowning.

"Yeah. You're new."

Cora approaches us. She's been waitressing here since I was three.

"Can I get you anything?" She smiles down at Edward.

Edward skims the menu, a laminated insert in one side of the aluminum napkin holder. Cora looks at me suggestively while his eyes are elsewhere. I shake my head at her and point at the Biology papers.

The ones I've splayed all over the table.

For this reason.

She looks disappointed. That's right, Cora. Nothing to report to Charlie.

"I'm good, thanks," Edward says. Cora leaves, doubly disappointed.

"So, about this Biology report…" I start. I shove my outline across the table to him. While he reads it, I nibble on half of my garden burger.

"This is good," he says, his dark eyebrows raised slightly.

Should it bother me that he seems surprised? I'm going to assume that Edward is just surprised a lot around me. I'm going to assume it has nothing to do with his perception of my intelligence and how I may have just surpassed said perception.

We dive in to our Biology report. He suggests a couple of different sections, and we divide them up. We're in the middle of a heated (for Edward) discussion about the finer points of the heart's left ventricle when Rosalie walks in. I thought I saw her red convertible drive by once already. I suspect that the silver Volvo outside the diner had something to do with her decision to enter.

She's got three of the cheerleading pack in orbit. Lauren is not one of them, so I relax. Marginally. They walk straight to our table. Behind the counter, Cora looks particularly interested. Besides me, she's probably never seen anyone younger than 30 in this diner in a decade. Of course, I sometimes feel like a 35-year-old in a teenager's body when compared to my so-called peers, so perhaps I don't count.

Rosalie looks at my Biology notes arranged artfully on the table. Note that they've come in handy yet again.

"Hey," she says. It's a generic greeting, but she's looking at Edward. I mumble something. Edward looks up at her immediately.

"Hey," he says.

"I'm spreading the word about Mike's party tomorrow night."

"Yeah?" Edward asks. See him pretend that Lauren hasn't already told him all about it.

"You should come." Rosalie pauses for a second. "You too, Bella. It's a costume party."

What a compelling argument.

"Okay," Edward says. Apparently _he_ feels compelled, but I don't think it's because of the costumes. "I will attend."

I read once that only 85% of people who say that they will do something to someone's face actually follow through when they have a chance to think about it later without the pressure of said peer in their face. After reading that little statistic, I've done my best to avoid committing anything to anyone's face. The likelihood of me actually following through later is generally slim, particularly where Forks social events are involved. But I don't think Edward is going to have trouble following through.

_Hm_, I think. Maybe costumes aren't so bad.

"Hm," I mumble to Rosalie. She's not looking at me, but she takes my near silence as tacit agreement.

"Great," she says and flashes her dimples at Edward once more before turning to leave. Needless to say, I don't trust Rosalie. Or Lauren, for that matter, who had also mentioned something about costumes. Now that I think about it, their deliveries were suspiciously similar.

When Rosalie and her posse leave, I call Mike because—whatever else might be said about the boy—he won't lie to me. Edward watches me speculatively over the top of the Bio outline. When Mike picks up, I hear this odd crackle and someone saying "Crap!" There's more noise, and I wait.

"Bella?" Mike is out of breath. I've never called him before. Even when cell phones were sweeping like wildfire through school for the first time, and you called people who were sitting ten feet away in the lunch room just because you could.

"Sorry, I dropped my phone," he says.

Lucky there wasn't a toilet nearby. Although I've always had this secret wish that someone I'm talking to would drop their cell phone in a toilet. I'm curious what sound it would make. And if I'd hear their voice weirdly distorted through the water as they shrieked about the grossness of what their next action would be. Not, of course, that I really want anyone to be in a bathroom while speaking to me.

"So, party this weekend?"

"Yeah. Party like a rock star. My house." Ha. He's playing it cool.

"Costumes?"

"Yeah…" He's about to say something else, but then someone else talks to him. It sounds like his mom. I think she said "Party?!"

"Gotta go," I say and hang up. I certainly don't want to get in the middle of that. Edward watches my phone as I set it back down on the table.

"So," he says, "I know a great place to get costumes."

On the list of things that I expected him to say here, this is the very last one. Okay, fine, this statement didn't actually make the list. Somehow, I can't imagine Edward in a costume. Then again, I couldn't imagine him in a diner, either.

His face darkens as he observes my gaping mouth. He explains, "My sister was ranting about the grand opening of some costume shop the other day."

Okay. This makes more sense. His sister has worn some of the most outrageous outfits I've ever seen.

"I'll go with you on one condition," I say. I'm thinking: Handprints. "I get to pick your costume."

"Um," he says. "I don't think—"

"Handprints," I say.

His eyes go wide. He stares at my phone with his freaky yellow eyes, and I think I see his pupils dilate slightly. I can practically see the cogs spinning in his brain.

"I agree to your condition. On one condition."

I see that he also recovers well.

"I'm listening."

"I get to pick _your_ costume."

"I don't think you have—"

"I'll tell Tyler you would love to go to prom with him," Edward says.

_Any leverage_, is what I had been about to say before I see that it's blackmail he's after.

We look at each other. We have a deal. An unspoken understanding. We do not shake on it. I don't think Edward likes to be touched. Hand-patting and all that. That's okay because I'm not big on touching either.

I notice that, when we leave, Edward leaves a tip on the table in a denomination that I've never even seen in real life. Back at our table, Cora stares at him in awe as we walk out.

Somebody tell me why I have agreed to a social engagement with Edward Cullen.

Okay fine. It's obvious by now that I have some type of twisted preoccupation with him. He's not at all what I judged him to be by his cover.

I mean, once you get past the handicap of him being ridiculously good-looking, he's not half bad. His obvious discomfort around me is amusing. His lack of success with Rosalie is entertaining. And the story I sense behind his freaky yellow eyes is intriguing.

The real question is: Why has Edward Cullen agreed to a social engagement with me?

* * *

"So you haven't told anyone," Edward says. He's all nonchalant. And he's just answered my question.

I should have known he had an ulterior motive for this invite, so I play dumb.

"What's to tell?"

Edward is driving us to Port Angeles. The great place his sister recommends for costumes is there. Not surprising, since everything that you need is usually in Port Angeles rather than Forks.

"You think you saw handprints on Tyler's car."

He has only one hand on the wheel.

"I don't think. I _know_."

He's driving a bazillion miles an hour.

"They could have been anyone's handprints."

My hands are gripping the sides of his seat. My feet are pressed into the floorboard. Why oh why don't they provide the passenger side with its own brakes?

"Right, because just anyone can stop a van with their bare hands."

His one hand tightens on the wheel. His knuckles are even whiter than normal.

"Nobody is going to believe you if you say anything."

Note that he just agreed that there were handprints in the side of the van.

"I agree. They won't believe me when I tell them. They will think I'm crazy."

"Why's that?"

I lower my voice. I lean over toward him conspiratorially.

"Because I'm the one who stopped the van," I say, matter-of-factly.

Edward looks skeptical. I lean back over to my side of the car. My eyes are glued to the road disappearing under the car.

"Right before you fell down and hit your head?" Edward asks.

I blink.

He's good, but I'm better.

"Yes. My head is my only weakness. My Achilles…um…head, as it were. Don't tell anyone."

He's looking at me with this weird expression. My guess is that he's wondering if my head really is as okay as I've claimed. Probably not, but he doesn't have to know that.

"Okay," he says. He doesn't really believe me, but we're almost at our destination.

I plaster a ditzy smile on my face and look back out my window at the forest streaming by at impossible speeds. I'm really, really good at playing dumb.

However, as I'm hoping I've made clear by this point, I'm not really dumb. A dumb person would not have figured out Edward's secret. Granted, I had the advantage all along of understanding that those freaky yellow eyes mean something. Inevitably, freaky eyes of any sort point to something fiendish.

What further clued me in was a little run-in with Edward in Biology. I say run-in in the most literal sense as I did, in fact, run into Edward. Obviously, you know I'm clumsy. Therefore, I'm sure it's not a stretch to visualize me accidentally tripping on something on the floor of the Biology classroom (my feet) and plowing headfirst into the aisle between the lab tables.

Seconds before I impacted the floor, my fall was arrested by something hard and cold. That alone might have been enough to clue me in, as this was the same hard and cold something I'd felt before Tyler's van conveniently stopped a few inches from my nose.

I looked up to see that Edward was the one who had broken my fall. His arms cradled my back lightly, and his face was inches from mine.

For a second, we stared at each other. Then he reacted in a way that solidified my conclusion.

"Will you watch where you're going?" he hissed through clenched teeth. Teeth that were clenched as though he were in pain.

Without waiting for me to answer, he set me on my feet as though I weighed no more than a toddler and stalked off. I stood staring at his retreating pea coat, and then everything just clicked. How many people at this school felt hard and cold instead of soft and warm and could set me on my feet with practically only one arm? I'll give you two guesses.

And no, it's not Mike Newton. In his dreams.

And I _knew_ I'd recognized Stimpy's voice in the hospital. Not just any voice has the musical quality of a Disney character.

But I don't tell Edward that I've figured out what he did for me that day in the parking lot. Because here's the thing about superheroes: Nothing good ever comes of outing them before they're ready. If you do, you deprive yourself of all kinds of "in the know" moments before the superhero in question knows that you're in the know.

Besides, it doesn't really matter. This isn't my story. I'll keep Edward's secret like a good little sidekick. After all, I'm beginning to suspect that's all I am in this little epic mythos. The faithful sidekick who is amazing and all but who is suspiciously absent when the hero and heroine finally get together. I can totally see myself as the Robin to Edward's Batman. The Chloe Sullivan to his Clark Kent. The Pedro to his Napoleon Dynamite.

I don't think I have to tell you who the heroine of this story is. I can just see Rosalie on the pages of a comic book. She even has the appropriately blue eyes, red lips, blonde hair, and curvaceous figure.

Me? I believe I already told you about my smock and goggles.

* * *

It's later (if you think about it, it's always later), and I'm at home. I've just told Charlie that I'm going to a party tonight.

"If this is one of those kegger parties—"

"It's at the Newton's."

As expected, Charlie's mouth snaps shut, his fears assuaged. I don't have the heart to tell him that Mike Newton is famous for throwing the wildest parties in Forks. Mike lives a bit outside of town. He has no immediate neighbors with trigger-happy cop-dialing fingers.

Charlie says something nice about Mike. To him, Mike walks on water because he is one of the few kids in town without so much as a speeding ticket.

I also don't have the heart to tell him that it's because Mike knows how to use his baby face to his advantage. That and he spends so much of his energy on the kicked puppy routine around me that he doesn't have proper time to devote to your normal teenage shenanigans.

"Well, have a good time…" Charlie's voice trails off as he turns to look at me for the first time. The leather of his recliner creaks like a saddle.

"Is that what you're wearing?!" He's my father; he _should_ be shocked.

"It's a costume party."

"It's not Halloween."

"It's a pre-Halloween party."

"In May?"

"May 1 is exactly halfway between Halloween last year and this year. It's called Ween."

I can say things like this because I am an honor student. I can intelligently deliver ludicrous facts. People around me often smile and nod. My dad knows me better. But he doesn't force the issue.

"Have a great time," he repeats dryly and turns back to the game on TV. Creak goes the leather. That's his signature move. He should get it patented.

I wave a merry "Thanks, dad!" to him and roar away in my truck to go pick up Edward. That was the deal. I graciously allow Edward to drive me to Port Angeles, and I get to drive us to the party.

* * *

I'm balancing awkwardly on the edge of a cream leather couch in the middle of cream walls layered with cream curtains. Edward's parents sit across from me in identical cream club chairs.

Judging from the gleams of fascination in their eyes, I would bet good money that Edward does not get visitors. Ever.

I would also bet that he might have failed to mention the fact that he was attending a party. With me.

After we make small talk for a while, silence settles.

I'm grateful to see Edward at the top of the stairs behind their heads. He's dressed all in black, but there's something missing. I can't quite put my finger on it…oh yes, it's his entire costume. All missing.

I frown up at him, but he puts a single finger on his lips, cautioning me to silence. I will not comply. His parents probably already think I'm a freak because I am (a) the first person to ever visit their son and am (b) standing here dressed as a bumblebee.

My frown transforms into a sugary smile with lots of teeth as Edward descends the stairs. My bumblebee antenna wave on my head. His eyes narrow, no doubt at my expression.

"Edward," I beam at him, my voice too loud. "Where's your cape?"

"Cape?" His father says, raising a single, blonde eyebrow.

Do tell, Edward.

"I have it here," he says smoothly to his parents, waving a dark bundle in his hand, but then shoots lasers at me with his freaky yellow eyes. "We're going to a costume party."

Nope, not going to be that easy.

"He's Count Dracula," I add. His dad's left eyebrow shoots upward to join his right, and his mom nearly chokes on a laugh. Needless to say, I picked his outfit before he picked mine. Either way, I have this thing about capes…

"That's…great, honey," she says. The three of them look into each other's yellow eyes for a moment. From their pointed eye movements, I get the impression there's something they aren't telling me. Edward's expression is dark as he sweeps by them and ushers me out the front door.

"Have a wonderful time," his mom calls out as we descend the front steps.

"And be careful," his dad says. The front door closes behind us, and his parents are hidden from view. They're giving us space.

Edward freezes at the edge of the driveway. Since Nellie is the only thing in his driveway, I assume that he's looking at her.

"You want to take my car?" he asks. Obviously, he'd forgotten about Nellie when he agreed to this. But Nellie's presence is essential (you'll see why), so I politely decline the offer of alternate transportation.

* * *

The ride is fairly quiet. Edward is oddly tense. The tendons in his forearm in the seat next to me are straining.

"Do you mind if I roll down the window?" he asks. I wonder if Nellie's oil and gas smell is getting to him. He hadn't reacted this way when we were in his car.

"If you can," I say. My passengers usually have problem with the window crank. It's kinda…cranky. Heh. But Edward doesn't have a problem. He rolls down the window in no time flat.

Of course. Even Nellie will give Edward anything he wants.

The party is in full swing when we arrive. The house is lit up like it's Christmas, and silhouettes of people are gyrating at all the windows. Think Macaulay Culkin's house in _Home Alone_.

Edward doesn't look at me again after we walk in the wide-open front door. He strides through the crowd, his cape billowing behind him. I assume he's making a beeline for Rosalie. I'm sure she's not hard to find. Wherever the center of attention is, there she will be.

"Happy Ween!" I say to Edward's retreating back. I'm distracted from further contemplation of my abandonment when I notice that all the kids dancing erratically in the living room are dressed in suspiciously similar outfits. I see pirates. And ninjas. But mostly pirates. I see Angela dancing with Ben, and she's also dressed as a pirate. Go figure. The only real ninja in this town came as a pirate.

I see Mike Newton head banging in the middle of the throng, and I stomp over to him. I have to stomp because my bumblebee costume came with these big, wide yellow shoes.

His eyes go bright and wide when he sees me, and he lets me pull him to the side.

"You said this was a costume party," I yell in his ear.

"Yeah!" he yells back. "Pirates and ninjas!"

I look down pointedly, and his eyes follow mine.

"Oh," he says.

I glare at him, and I'm thinking: Bright yellow. Five sizes too small.

He grins at me. "At least you stand out!"

Right. Because that is every teenager's dream.

Disgusted, I turn away from him and go stand in a corner. I kick myself for not making Edward wear that banana suit he tried on. We could have been bright yellow together in a sea of black. At least his cape allows him to blend in.

A couple of kids are banging out chopsticks on the Newton's upright piano.

"Are you a pirate or a ninja?" some girl asks me. She's clearly not firing on all cylinders right now.

The kids are absolutely butchering chopsticks on the piano. The sound is annoyingly dissonant. But they like it, so they keep going. There is an unwritten rule that people who can't really play piano will play it loudest.

"A ninja, duh," I say to the girl, flicking one of my antennas suggestively. She wanders off, satisfied with my reply.

I get a lot of other comments about my outfit, most of them not as nice. There are a lot of seniors at this party, and they are really good at making juniors feel dumb. They've succeeded. I feel stupid and small and five years old. Which, I guess, is not a bad assumption considering I'm in a costume designed for five year olds.

"So you didn't get the memo?" Eric says, draping an arm over me.

"No, I did," I say, shrugging out from under his arm with a fake smile. "I just couldn't pass up the antenna." With my hands, I show him how I carefully weighed my options. "Numb chucks….antenna…numb chucks…antenna. Not a toughie."

See me try to play cool. I am about half a second from bolting for Nellie.

Then I hear it.

There's a lull in chopsticks at the same time that the CD changer runs out of pre-queued music. The Chopsticks Twins have apparently gone in search of fuel for the next round of musical genius we'll be subjected to.

In the stillness, someone starts to play "Flight of the Bumblebee" on the piano. And I'm not talking the two-fingered crap that had been chopsticks. I'm talking the full-blown, crazy scales, speed and all Rimsky-Korsakov version itself.

If this doesn't impress you, sue me. What do I know? Do I seem like the type of person with the coordination to punch a lot of closely spaced keys with my fingers? But trust me, it sounds fantastic. Two guesses who's sitting at the piano.

And no, it's not Mike Newton. In his dreams.

His cape shrouding him in mystery, Edward Cullen sits and flawlessly executes one of the most difficult piano pieces I have ever heard in "real" life. I listen. He does not miss a note. Of course, this can be explained. Most of the partiers look at him, rapt. They do not know that he has handy superpowers. Some of them look at me, and they are making this crazy connection.

"A bumblebee," one of them says with a pretend finger gun pointed at me.

"Let's make it fly," someone else says.

"Uh…" I say. I'm not really thinking about them. I'm looking at Edward. He finishes the piece and then swivels on the piano bench to look in my direction. Not at me, mind you, but in my general vicinity. His plastic vampire teeth make him look like he's smiling. But his eyes tell a different story; they are scrunched a bit and are intense.

When he looks like that, his eyes look less freaky yellow. They look almost golden.

I am the life of the party then. Everyone wants to be my friend. A couple of guys try and make me "fly" by dancing with me. I mash on their toes for a while in my big yellow shoes, and they quickly stop. Someone finds yellow crepe paper, and the ninjas start wrapping themselves in it so they can be bumblebees as well.

The next time I look over at the piano, Edward is still sitting there. But Rosalie is there now, too, and her hand is on his shoulder. I've told you my theory about Rosalie and spotlights, right?

She doesn't disappoint.

Oddly, though, Rosalie turns and sees me. She walks over to where ten boys are dancing in a weird circle around me. They're calling themselves my bee hive.

"Swan," she calls, and the boys instantly part for her.

"Bee!" the boys correct.

"Let's play a game," she says, only to me. "Downstairs."

I say, "Okay," and follow her.

* * *

Honestly, this is so eighth grade.

Rosalie's idea of a game is "Seven Minutes in Heaven." You know, the one where a blindfolded girl goes and sits in a closet while a guy whose name is pulled out of a hat gets to come in and do whatever he wants for seven minutes. If you ask me, this activity does not sound respectable. Unless, of course, you're that type of girl.

Rosalie has found the perfect closet in the Newton's basement. Emmett is not here. He had another engagement. My stomach drops when I realize what this means.

My stomach drops even further when I see the little group that Rosalie has hand-picked—a nice set of even couples. Two pairs of obviously dating seniors. They are all over each other.

Me and Mike. Of course. Mike's providing the venue; he probably has an arrangement with Rosalie to (a) be involved in any illicit activities in the basement and (b) have a hand in picking the girl to be illicit with.

The only two left are Rosalie and Edward. He responded to Rosalie's siren call and is lounging against a dark-paneled wall, his face partially in the shadow of the staircase. I could probably see his yellow eyes gleam if I look. But I don't. Instead, I retreat to the opposite wall from Edward, abandoning our pretense at camaraderie in the face of our peers. I start to feel awkward again as I watch the first senior couple do its thing.

Then the second.

The game is rigged. Mike is looking at me hopefully with his baby face. The way the game is going, he'll get his wish.

Rosalie decides that she's waited long enough, and she asks for the blindfold. Forget freaky yellow eyes, I have my own powers. I know that the next name to come out of the magician's top hat will be "Edward."

I'm right. I don't wait around to see what will happen next.

I can't.

This is Edward's big moment, not mine.

My job is to cheer on the superhero. Inside, I'm cheering: Way to go, superhero, getting the girl of your dreams. Although why Rosalie's doing her Venus fly trap routine here is beyond me. Could this be some unnecessary ploy to make Emmett jealous? Or perhaps prove to herself and the competition that all guys desire her?

I wouldn't put either strategy past her.

Maybe she thought Edward was expending too much attention in a different direction with the whole piano incident.

"Uh, I'll be right back," I lie to no one. Except maybe Mike, who seems to notice that I'm leaving. I stumble up the stairs in my ginormous bumblebee feet. I don't think bumblebee even have feet. Someone should have considered this fact when designing this stupid costume.

Upstairs, I avoid members of my fragmented "bee hive" who perceive my reappearance as nothing short of a miracle. To avoid getting surrounded again, I bolt for my truck. I hope Edward likes to walk.

For once, I'm grateful for Nellie's loud roar. It makes my exit all the more emphatic.


	3. Chapter 3: Towers of psychobabble

**-| Type O Negative,** _continued_ **|-**

* * *

Today is not the greatest of days.

Strike one: It's Monday. If Monday were a person, the first thing it would do is play a solitary game of Russian Roulette—and lose.

Strike two: I'm still hearing a few too many bee jokes, many of them from people who weren't even at the party. Did I mention that news travels ridiculously fast in small towns?

Strike three: We're receiving the results of our personality quiz in Communications class. You know the type. You answer ten generic questions and suddenly the computer knows all about you. It spits out introvert/extravert, sensitive/insensitive, cool girl surrounded by all the boys/weird loner off in the corner listening to ear phones. You guessed it: My ear phones are shoved firmly in my ears as we speak.

"Bella, ear phones out, please," Ms. Berty says.

Well, they were.

This test has a twist. Rather than categorizing us in some weird alphabet soup (you did what to your INTJ?), this test uses colors to tell us how messed up and anti-social we are.

Ms. Berty is handing out the color blocks now. They are cleverly shaped as extra-large Legos (I guess those would be Duplos; thank you, year three of my life) but are made out of squishy foam. The better to deter us kiddos from poking our eyes out, choking, or performing an improbable combination of the two activities (for those of us who are especially gifted).

Did I mention I once impaled myself on a pencil?

And oh, what fun. Each block has a cheery little saying on it in cheery gold letters.

Red—Be bold, be bright  
Blue—Give me details  
Yellow—Involve me  
Green—Show me you care

Idly, I flick my green block off the table. I have a thing about green. Probably because I'm surrounded by too much of it. Here's what a better block would be:

Black—Shove it up your…

Keep it PG, kiddos.

Ms. Berty asks us to stack the blocks in order of how relevant we think each color is to our own personality. She thinks we care. She is all over this.

"Everyone is capable of energy in every color." She beams, and this is the part where we're supposed to feel good about ourselves. My peers nod and diligently stack their blocks, creating their own little rainbow tower of psychobabble.

I sigh and stack my own blocks with blue firmly on the top because it seems the lesser of three evils. I'm not counting green. I can see my green block teetering on the edge of Jessica's back pack. It will probably fall in, and then she'll find this weird green block in her bag later. If she asks me about it, I'll say, "It must be a sign that you _really_ want me to show you I care." I will offer her a hug. She will think about it but will probably decline.

After we take our best hack at what we think our personality is, Ms. Berty passes out the official personality profiles that quickly prove us wrong. Twenty-three single-spaced pages that unlock the mystery that is Bella Swan. And that apparently describe me throughout in the third person.

We are supposed to spend the next fifteen minutes reading our profile to ourselves. To my right, Edward scowls down at his twenty-three pages. I assume it's because they are telling him he is arrogant, egotistical, and insufferably rude.

I don't even read mine. Instead, I raise my hand.

"You said we should let you know if we don't agree with our dominant color."

"Yes," Ms. Berty says doubtfully. She can see where I'm going with this.

"Well, I don't."

"You don't." Note her lack of surprise.

"No. In fact, I'm a social bumblebee. I thrive on being the center of attention. I have a naturally sunny disposition. I am yellow." I say this in a monotone. I am reading from the yellow description on the summary sheet in front of me.

"Why don't you go through and cross out any of the sentences you don't agree with, then?"

If Ms. Berty were less polite, she would have said "Shut up." But she's a Forks High teacher. They are trained professionals. They go to school to learn how to deflect dumb questions with interest and respect. They receive special seminars each semester to help them deal with problem children like me.

I raise my hand again.

"This says that I'm partial to being at home alone. May I be excused from class? I may learn this better if I'm at home."

"No, I don't think that will work." See what I mean? Very diplomatic.

"Ms. Berty?" Edward raises his hand. "This document refers to me as a 'she' throughout."

* * *

Edward and I have detention after school. You're right in thinking that the brief exchange above did not warrant detention. But the follow-on snarkfest probably did.

It went something like this:

"Which brings me to my next point, Ms. B." I wave my hand in Edward's direction.

"Edward is a boy's name." Edward continues scowling down at his paper.

"This is a generic test with personality traits that could apply to anyone," I continue.

"The gender of my name is not remotely confusing."

"Hayden might have been confusing," I agree with him.

"Or Chris."

"Perhaps Erin."

"Dylan, I could understand."

"Students, you're reading into this—"

"Although there is one reason why the computer may have confused you with a girl."

"Ms. Swan, I don't think—"

"You wear guyliner."

Edward and I don't look at each other. We stare at the front of the room.

"And lipstick," I add.

"Your profile says that you are inexplicably drawn to guys in touch with their feminine side, doesn't it?"

"Actually," Ms. Berty says, "the profile doesn't include—"

"Actually," I say, "it says the opposite."

"You're attracted to girls?"

"No. I swoon for tan, blonde jocks who sweat and grunt and are manly."

"That's enough!" Ms. Berty's face is pink.

"Very stereotypical of you."

"Detention." Ms. Berty's face is red.

"Don't tell Mike," I warn.

"Both of you, after school." Her voice is low and menacing.

That's about how it went. Ms. Berty should have thanked us. The class was riveted; by an on-topic discussion, no less.

Now, Edward and I are in detention. He's pretending to do homework. But really, we are both sitting and staring at the clock on the wall. It has a plaque above it that reads, "Time will pass. Will you?" I add: If you're reading this, probably not.

I look at Edward, and he's still clutching his personality profile in a stack of homework. That reminds me—one black block set coming up. Luckily, we are in the art classroom, so I get up to look for the supplies I need: one bottle of black spray paint and one silver pen.

"What are you doing?" Edward asks. His pen is poised above his paper.

I open one of the drawers. One silver pen—check.

"You're not supposed to be walking around."

I pop open a cabinet. One bottle of black spray paint—check. I do not look at Edward or in any other way acknowledge his presence. I lay out my three Lego blocks on some newspaper on the floor. I spray paint the three blocks carefully.

I pointedly walk around as they dry.

Edward ignores me and finishes his Spanish homework. He has to write his own sentence to show he has mastered Spanish grammar, and he writes "La niña es loca." In one of the rare occasions I'm near his desk, he shoves his paper at me so that I can see what he thinks of me. I continue ignoring him and sit down cross-legged in front of my spray-painted blocks. They are dry enough.

I scrawl my revised taglines. My new block set is as follows:

Black #1—Give me liberty  
Black #2—Give me death  
Black #3—Bite me

Edward regards my handiwork and looks away. He seems uncomfortable. I hope he doesn't think I have a death wish. I think of plastic vampire teeth. I think that we should probably work on our Biology report. But I have a better idea.

"I'll let you read mine if I can read yours." I dangle my personality profile in front of him temptingly.

He looks at it for a second and then says, "Okay."

* * *

Edward's profile is absolutely fascinating. It explains a lot. For example, it says that he can be seen as cold and uncaring. And as insufferably rude. I think: Check and check.

I glance up to see Edward looking at me. He's apparently already read to the end of my profile, and he has a strange expression. The type of expression that could be accompanied by a stereotypical light bulb above his head.

"What?" I say. My voice is flat.

"Nothing," he says. "It's just that this explains a lot."

He must be reading something different than what I read.

"Hardly," I scoff. "Didn't you hear me earlier? My profile is all wrong. I'm clearly yellow. Social bumblebee, remember?"

"Yes, I remember the bumblebee." He looks back down with a tiny, crooked smile.

"What about the bumblebee?" I say. I'm starting to get irritated now. It wasn't my most shining moment. And it was all his fault.

He reads out loud, "May leave situations in which she feels uncomfortable."

"I'll have you know that I didn't leave the party because I was uncomfortable, thank you very much. My costume was all the rage. I was absolutely the belle of the ball."

Definitely the Bella in a ball. A bumblebee ball huddled in a corner.

"Why did you leave, then?" Is it just me, or does he seem to care? I don't think he'd even noticed my departure. Something about him being led by the hand to a closet at the time…

"Duh, the game was rigged. If you think I was going to spend seven minutes playing tonsil hockey with Newton, you're even more deranged than I thought."

"Hm," he says. He seems miffed that I think him deranged. As if he doesn't get that a lot.

"And anyway, your profile is a bunch of bull, too."

His face tightens even further than after the "deranged" comment.

"How so?"

"For example, it says that you often hide your true feelings." We blink at each other for a second. "I personally think you're an open book."

Edward leans forward in his chair.

"How do you know what true feelings I may or may not be hiding?"

Really? Is he seriously asking me this question? Maybe he hasn't noticed that he tenses up whenever Rosalie comes in a room. Maybe he doesn't remember switching to her lab table and pleading to be her lab partner. Maybe he doesn't remember following her around like a lovesick puppy down to the Newton's basement for a shot at playing tonsil hockey himself. Maybe he really is delusional.

"Oh please. I think you've made several things perfectly clear."

"Such as…"

I think: Could you have a more obvious crush on Rosalie?

But I say, "Such as the fact that you delight in terrifying unsuspecting people with your maniacal driving. Oh, and that you have a thing for Cora. Seriously, those tips you give her are a dead giveaway. I hope you don't mind that I've told her you have a thing for older women who work in diners."

We are silent for a moment.

"You know," Edward says dryly, "it says here that you often mask your own true feelings with sarcasm."

I am saved from an appropriately witty—perhaps sarcastic—reply by the sound of the detention bell. With a shrug, I snatch all twenty-three pages of increasingly irritating content and stuff them into my bag. As I walk out the door, I decide that said pages might make for a delightful mini-bonfire when I get home.

Time has passed, indeed.

* * *

I am acutely aware of three things the rest of the week:

(1) Edward is flat-out smirking at me whenever I happen to look his way  
(2) His smirk is especially annoying if I'm saying something sarcastic when I happen to catch his eye  
(3) Prom is approaching way too quickly

Speaking of prom, let me share with you an excellent recipe that I've discovered for teenage drama:

Hold an elaborate event. Tout it as the highlight of your high school career. Tout it as a veritable rite of passage, something you'll remember fondly later. Add a build up that requires a male to single out a female and verbally affirm that yes, he is attracted to her. Dress the girls up in skimpy outfits and treacherous footwear. Slap the guys in identical, heavy layers of dark clothing. Ensure that everyone is self-conscious, either hot or cold, and uncomfortable. Top it all off by requiring said kids to perform an activity (dancing) that they don't really know how to do.

You can see why prom is the quintessential stage for teenage drama. I don't know why we don't just call it "prama" and get it over with. Even better, the joy of prom does not start the day of; oh no, it spawns drama for weeks leading up to it.

For example, there are a number of ways you can get asked to prom, each with varying degrees of creativity and complexity. After my near-death experience, I find out first-hand how creative boys can be to convince someone to go to prom. I chalk it up to my male buddies being overly sentimental about my potential death. I think I've inspired them to take risks. To seize life by the horns. To live like they were dying, as it were.

Unfortunately, this involves discomfort and even some humiliation on my part. Below are the strategies used in order of how easy I find them to handle:

Strategy #1: Write her a note. Extra points if it's in the shape of a paper airplane and hits her in the back of the head during Spanish. In my case, I opened the note, shook my head once at Mike, and sent it on its journey to the trash can. I missed, of course, but Mike got the message.

Strategy #2: Ask her in person, in private. I believe we already discussed Tyler Crowley's particular spin on this tactic before I agreed to let him carry my books to Biology as a consolation prize.

Strategy #3: Ask her in person, in public. Use this technique only if you want one or both of you to be embarrassed. Eric asked me to prom in the middle of the cafeteria. Using the microphone that the principal uses for occasional announcements, no less. Angela told me later that I flushed beet red and practically ran for the exit. (I told Eric later that Angela and I are going stag.)

Eric's little stunt inspired Ben to ask Angela (via strategy #2) the same day. Unlike Tyler, Ben was successful. And Angela didn't give Ben the same excuse that I gave Eric, which put me in a bit of a pickle. I need someone to go stag with, but all my friends and even my acquaintances are falling, one by one, to the allure of having a date at prom.

It's boring and just a wee bit awkward to try and dance by yourself. Or, in my case, to sit and watch the coordinated people dance—by myself.

I am sitting in the diner thinking about my options when a random comment Edward makes gives me the perfect idea. We've met up again to work on the final phase of our Biology report. Same time, same place. Since we've started coming here, there has been an odd influx in the number of our peers to frequent the diner as well. Our female peers, to be exact.

"Are you going to prom with anyone?" Edward asks.

He asks me this just as Emmett enters the diner with a bouquet of red roses. Emmett gets down on one knee at Rosalie's table. Her friends coo and sigh as he officially asks her to prom. He's officially her boyfriend, so it's understood that they're going together. But that's Emmett. He's all about the gestures. Saving kids from bullies. Unnecessarily asking his spotlight-loving girlfriend to prom in a romantic, public way.

I wait until Rosalie's squealing dies down before answering Edward.

"I'm going stag."

"Oh."

We watch Rosalie throw herself into Emmett's arms.

"I'm available," he says.

He must be more dimwitted than I thought if he'd been holding out for a last-minute Rosalie break-up.

"Seriously, I need an excuse to be off the market. I'm getting hourly updates about who doesn't yet have a date."

Case in point, his cell phone buzzes with a text. He doesn't even look at it. Oh, poor little Edward has a fan club. Woe is he.

"At least the girls aren't required to ask you to prom in varying degrees of humiliation."

"At least you can always pretend like you don't understand the question."

"Uh, what could I possibly confuse the word 'prom' with?"

"Bomb. Mom. Aplomb." He rattles off these rhyming words immediately.

"Right, because those words all make so much sense in context."

"That's the point. Gives you the perfect out. Allow me to demonstrate."

He affects a serious face. He sits up very straight.

"Bomb? Where? We'd better get to the bomb shelter. Your mom? Isn't it a little early for me to be meeting your parents? We haven't even dated yet. Aplomb? I'm already there. You're the one who's freaking out."

I stare at him and bust out laughing. I can just see Mike running after me, screaming about a bomb. The boy is easily distracted. And I don't think he even knows the word "aplomb."

I'm still laughing as I say, "I guess you're cool enough to go stag with me, if you'd like."

He cocks his head slightly at me as though he can't quite figure me out. But he rolls with it.

"Okay. I'll pick you up at 7."

I guess the boy didn't learn his lesson from my personality profile after all.

"No, that won't work."

Remember the last time Edward and I went to a party together? Not wanting to dredge up our bumblebee argument from detention, I try an alternate and completely plausible excuse.

"Nellie will get offended if she's left out of the action, particularly if neglected in favor of one of those flashy foreign cars."

"Okay."

I'm impressed by the restraint he shows in not responding to my jab about his car. I also note that he doesn't ask me who Nellie is.

"Let's just meet there," I say.

I may need my getaway car again.

We go back to Biology. The report is due tomorrow.

* * *

"What's this?" I say as Edward drops a crisp report onto my side of the Biology table.

"It's our Biology report." He stacks his books neatly in a corner of the table. I see two more copies at the top of the stack.

"This is not what I e-mailed to you last night."

"It is," he says as Mr. Banner comes to collect them. "I just added some stuff."

I nearly snatch the report out of Mr. Banner's hand. I tremble with the effort to restrain myself. My personality profile says that I have a tendency to mistrust the work of others and that I would prefer to own the work myself. Watch as I prove the profile wrong.

I spend the rest of the period reading "our" report. It's still my writing, but Edward has added a subtle yet unbelievable level of detail and polish. He elevated our project to an entirely different level. The level of the Greek gods, perhaps?

Rosalie completely missed out. From the way she's eying the report that James no doubt created for her, she's aware of this fact. On his part, James merely looks pleased that his and Rosalie's names are on the same piece of paper.

I re-read our report that night, twice. Edward's influence is subtle, nearly invisible unless you know where to look. He interweaves additional research and detail into what I'd found, complementing my writing style perfectly and strengthening every aspect of the document. I can still see me in the work, but now there is also Edward.

Mr. Banner is going to have a heart attack when he reads this. I'm almost surprised to see Mr. Banner in class the next day. But his eyes _are_ unnaturally bright. He's staring at Edward and me in awe. He hands back the various reports. He hands ours back last and hovers at our desk. Edward immediately passes me the graded report and leans back in his chair. He exposes me to Mr. Banner's gaze.

I look down to see that we received a perfect score. Plus bonus points. Mr. Banner also filled the remaining room on the last page with a hand-written note about the insightfulness of the document.

"This was quite the read."

This is an understatement on Mr. Banner's part. I know this because I'm reading his note.

"Your lecture on this topic last week was inspiring," Edward says.

You can almost see Mr. Banner's head explode. Edward is like a teacher's dream incarnated.

"You two make a great team."

He pauses for a second.

"I would love to see a follow-up piece to this."

The class groans. I don't groan with them. I feel…good. This is about to change. Tomorrow night is prom, and, in true prom tradition, it won't go as I expect. Only, I don't know that yet.

All I know right now is that Edward just made me look darned good in a class that I despise. I look over at him as Mr. Banner wanders back to the front of the class.

I mouth, "Thanks."

He looks at my mouth and smiles.


	4. Chapter 4: Prama

**------------| Type O Negative, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

Edward is not smiling when I see him the next day in the gym foyer. He's standing stiffly by a potted plant. He looks okay. Decent. Passable, even. You don't believe me? You see through my attempted nonchalance?

Fine.

He's standing there, all angles and steel and contrasts, in the type of suit that probably comes with a ridiculously recognizable foreign label. Someone should move the plant before it wilts in his brilliance. Good thing he's not my date. We'd give all the other couples a complex.

Well. We would if perhaps I'd taken this whole prom thing more seriously. But I'd decided in a last-minute fit of classic teenage rebellion that I was going to do my own thing. I mean, I enjoyed the bumblebee fiasco so much that I thought a repeat was in order. (Translation: I couldn't find anything to wear. You know, one of those times when you're sure that dress will work but then you try it on the day of your event and you think you must have been possessed to have brought it home. And why, oh why won't your closet proactively spew forth that perfect outfit from the stuff you have but you'd never thought of putting together?)

Because my closet wouldn't oblige, I took a stab at assembling my own outfit. I grabbed my little black dress and some accessories that I hoped would magically coordinate well enough for me to look put together. On the exterior, at least. Which is, after all, the facet that's all the rage.

And I tried for heels. I really did. After all, what's prom without a few blood blisters at the end of the night? But after taking one step down the stairs in a single, dainty heel and nearly plunging to my death, I thought: Who am I kidding? I went with my classic Converse.

This is the me that Edward now sees:

(1) Little, black knee-length dress  
(2) Black shrug covering my shoulders  
(3) Black Capri leggings hiding my chicken legs  
(4) Classic Converse comfortably and sensibly encasing my feet  
(5) Skinny red tie punctuating my neck

The tie was a last-minute addition. I mean, why wait for Halloween when you can do "prom gone wrong" on prom itself? The outfit has more of a kick to it that way. A quirky sidekick kick.

"Very eclectic." Edward smirks at me as I approach. Which, of course, means that I blush and look down at my feet. Edward and I shuffle in the line to enter the gym. I'm still looking at my feet as Edward and I pose for the traditional prom photo. His shiny shoes emphasize the dirt and scuffs on mine.

"Eyes front," he says to me just as the flash explodes in my eyeballs. I keep still. I know how these picture things go.

The lady shakes the Polaroid, takes one look, and says, "Let's do another one, dears." l don't have the heart to tell her that, in this case, repetition won't improve quality. But at least I have my eyes up and am looking at the camera.

Beside me, Edward no doubt does his best impression of an Abercrombie model. He puts a single hand on my lower back. The camera flashes just in time to catch my resulting expression. I snatch the photo out of the lady's hand before she's even finished shaking it out.

"Thanks," I add to offset my rudeness.

I look at the photo in my hand and see an expression on my face that I've never seen before. I'm not grimacing, I don't have my eyes closed, and I don't look my normal degree of photogenically challenged. I turn and slip the photo in the breast pocket of Edward's coat.

"Keep this to remember your magical evening by," I say as I give the pocket a pat.

"Will do," he says solemnly.

Edward and I wander toward the gym door as though we are connected by an invisible four-foot rope. We're not here together, obviously, but there is a tension between us, keeping us in the general vicinity. When I see Angela and Ben, I wave, but I don't head over. Like Edward, I have this thing against third wheels.

I find myself at the punch bowl. Edward eyes the bowls of mixed nuts and mints. I'm shocked when he scoops a couple of almonds and pops them into his mouth. I've never seen him eat before.

"I thought you were manorexic," I say to him over the increasing din. He steps a little closer to me, but not too close.

"What?" He seems startled.

No chance I'm repeating that.

"I said, do you want to go grab a seat?"

Yeah, I couldn't think of a word that rhymes with _manorexic_. Besides the obvious.

"Uh, sure."

We plant ourselves in a good vantage point where I can see all the late-breaking action that prom affords. By unspoken agreement, we leave one metal folding chair empty between us. After a while, Edward stretches an arm out over the empty chair and crosses a leg. I am _not_ aware that his supple pianist fingers are mere inches from my right arm.

After only a few moments of uncomfortable silence during which I try to focus on not obsessing about how his fingers would feel playing the bumblebee song on my arm, we start joking about the various unlikely prom couples and the stories we've both heard about how people got asked. Edward has amazing insight. He knows that Tommy went into the bathroom and threw up before _and_ after asking Jen. He knows that Clarissa turned down Connor after he subjected her to an elaborate treasure hunt because she wasn't sure who'd be at the end of it.

The later it gets, we watch the entrances become progressively more grand and the dance floor starts to fill.

Now Edward seems on edge, and I know what he's waiting for. A few more minutes, and there it is, ladies and gents: the grand entrance of the future king and queen of Forks High. Rosalie enters, Emmett the perfect accessory in his sharp tuxedo. She's dressed in a sparkling white diamond gown. And you guessed it—the lighting guy even throws an obliging spotlight.

The only thing that mars their entrance is a dark-clad figure who skirts past her to get in the door. It's James. He must have stepped on Rosalie's train (and did I miss the part where this event doubles as her wedding?) because she comes to an abrupt halt and turns to glare at him. James shrugs apologetically and smiles a smile that doesn't travel to his cold, blue eyes.

Beside me, Edward straightens and sits forward in his chair. He is staring at Rosalie. I watch James fade into the woodwork. Rosalie picks up where she left off and continues gliding into the dark gym. Edward is distracted the next time I try to talk to him. Two guesses as to why.

Edward's siblings enter next, and I nearly cackle to myself as their entrance eclipses Rosalie's continued progression to the dance floor. Jasper twirls Alice as they enter, and she spins gracefully, the movement in her dress artfully displayed. Alice looks over at Edward and me, but she and Jasper don't approach. Instead, they follow Rosalie to the dance floor.

We watch his siblings dance circles around the other couples for a while.

When Mr. Greene steps up to announce the prom court, I nearly fake yawn.

"Ten bucks says it's Rose and Em," I say.

Edward doesn't reply immediately.

"Um," is all he says.

I look over at him. He's scowling at Mr. Greene. He looks like he's sending Mr. Greene mind bullets. After much ado about nothing, Mr. Green eventually meanders to the debatable climax of his little speech.

"This year's Prom Queen is…Rosalie Hale!"

I applaud politely with one finger against my palm as she gushes to the front. And oh look, the crown complements her dress perfectly.

"And this year's Prom King is…"

Dramatic pause.

"Edward Cullen!" Mr. Greene states with false enthusiasm. You can tell that he'd rather be home on a Saturday night rather than chaperoning a group of kids playing at being adults.

Edward receives significantly more than polite applause. There may be screaming involved. And some crying. And at least one instance of fainting.

I don't scream. Or clap.

I had forgotten that students vote. I don't even remember seeing the ballot this year. Oh, that's right. Angela filled mine out for me. I asked her to read off the male/female candidates she thought least likely to win.

"Lauren and James," she answered immediately.

I remember thinking it weird that James made the list.

"Put me down for them," I said.

This is why I missed the fact that Edward was nominated. This is why I was not aware that I am technically, going to be stag by myself after all once he is crowned.

To her credit, Rosalie takes this development in stride. Edward less so, but he does at least stride toward this development. Rosalie gives Emmett a kiss on the cheek and steps over to take the traditional king and queen pictures with Edward. We all watch as they don the customary prom court regalia.

Edward looks uncomfortable. The crown is cocked oddly on his head because of his hair. He doesn't know what to do with the scepter. And the little red velvet cape looks cheap against his suit. Rosalie, of course, takes to the regalia like it was made for her. Come to think of it, it probably was.

I notice that Edward does not wrap an arm around Rosalie. He does not even put a hand at the small of her back. She makes up for it by wrapping herself around _him_ like strands of ivy. I notice that Emmett looks just as uncomfortable as Edward. I also notice that the king and queen look absolutely stunning together.

As soon as picture time is over, Edward divests himself of the finery. He places his crown back on its blue satin pillow. I feel sorry for the crown because its debut is cut unexpectedly short this year. That's okay. Rosalie's use of her crown will more than make up for it.

I think for a second that Edward is coming back to me. He looks over the crowd and seems satisfied that I'm still sitting here. He starts in my general direction. Then he freezes with a look of concentration on his face. I've seen it before, usually right before he does something weird.

He doesn't disappoint. Edward walks right up to Rosalie, whom Emmett is escorting back to the dance floor, and whispers something in her ear. She flashes Edward a radiant smile and offers him her arm. Emmett looks stoic, but the type of stoic you might see after a guy gets kicked in the balls. It's almost painful to watch him try not to crumble. Edward escorts Rosalie to the dance floor. They start to dance.

And yes, there's a spotlight.

Not like Edward even needs it. Every eye in the gym is on him as he dances with Rosalie. Everyone holds his or her breath as Edward twirls her and dips her and makes her even more beautiful. Edward has this effect on people. Rosalie basks in his reflected glory. The crystals in her gown and crown catch the light just so. You can just see girls throughout the gym mentally crawl into a little hole.

The chair beside me scrapes unexpectedly. I look up to see Emmett in his sharp tuxedo stealing Edward's chair. I find this only fair since Edward is stealing something of his.

Emmett has not spoken to me since elementary school. In a few minutes, we're chatting like old friends. After all, we have something very much in common right now. After asking me how I've been (super), what I'm thinking so far about prom (little), and how I feel about the level of homework distributed by the Forks High teachers (ambivalent), Emmett gets down to business.

"Is it just me, or is that dude trying to steal my girlfriend?"

I think: It's not just you.

I say, "Rosalie is crazy about you."

She'd be crazy not to be. He ponders this for a bit. I didn't really answer his question, which is, in and of itself, an answer.

"Do you think I could take him?"

I look Emmett up and down. I size him up. On the one hand, you have your iron-pumping sports superstar. On the other hand, you have your car-stopping creepy superhero. As much as I'd like to see Edward receive a good pummeling right now, Emmett's not the guy I would send in there.

"No, probably not."

His face falls.

"You're probably right. There's something about him. I can't quite put my finger on it. It's like he's…"

"Creepy? Fiendish? Sociopathic?"

Emmett stares. "Uh, I was going to say 'dangerous.' But yeah, that works. I think."

He looks speculative as he continues watching his girlfriend shine in the arms of another man. Edward and Rosalie do a particularly elaborate dip move. As Emmett leans forward to get a better view, I glance at the watch on his left wrist. Would you look at the time? Time to go.

"I forgot I have some laundry to do," I mumble to Emmett and quickly make my escape. It's a testament to how despondent he is that he merely mumbles, "Yeah, I probably do, too" and waves me a feeble goodbye. Perhaps he thinks laundry is the new euphemism for homework.

I tell myself that I'm not leaving because I'm uncomfortable. That I'm glad Edward is happy. That I'm glad he and his heroine are enjoying their moment in the sun.

Fine, I'm lying. Let's face it. I'm leaving because I never asked to know Edward's secrets. I didn't ask him to save me. I didn't ask him to show me the man behind the mask. But he did, he's saved me, he's let me really see him, and now that I've felt his touch and seen this much, I need to feel and see more.

Clearly, there's something wrong with me; I'm obsessing about a boy who can barely stand to be in the same room with me, a boy who I didn't even know existed two months ago and who acted like I didn't exist up until two weeks ago. Now that I know some of his secrets, I want to know them all. I want to scrape off his mask entirely and look into his true face and have him look into mine and get inside his head and see what thoughts are lurking behind those dangerous, beautiful eyes.

And I want him to explain what he's done to make me care so much and why I wish more than ever to be Rosalie so I that I could capture his gaze. So that I would know what his arms feel like.

What his skin feels like.

Instead, I flee like the world's biggest coward through the dark school halls toward Nellie, my salvation. Just as the neon exit sign beckons, my exodus is interrupted by a sound, a rather violent sound that resonates so well with my current mental state that I stop. I look over to see James punching a locker.

He seems…perturbed. I know exactly how he feels. Some of his blonde hair has escaped his pony tail and is fanning erratically around his face. He turns his head, and his cold blue eyes stare me down. I think: That's what you get for nominating yourself Prom King. I want to tell him that he got at least one vote. I want to stand here and pound some lockers with him.

But I don't.

His expression is not what you'd call inviting. You'd call it creepy, fiendish, or sociopathic. If you were really looking and weren't too wrapped up in your own small life.

Tomorrow, I would wish that my thoughts hadn't been so focused on freaky yellow eyes that I failed to see the fiendish gleam in blue ones.

But tonight, any unease I feel is trumped by the need to flee.

* * *

Sunday morning, I wake up late, the sun already having asserted its dominance in the sky. It probably has something to do with the fact that my dreams were plagued with freaky eyes of both the cold-blue and golden-yellow variety and of people leaving handprints in shiny red lockers.

By the time I get up, Charlie is already gone. He goes fishing very early every Sunday because fish are apparently early risers. I get up because someone is knocking at the front door. I can't imagine who this might be. I shuffle downstairs in my frayed bathrobe and pink bunny slippers and stifle a yawn. I look out the peep hole. I see a single freaky yellow eye grossly magnified and distorted.

Crap.

Edward is standing on my front porch.

"Give me a minute," I say and nearly fall over myself racing back up the stairs. I take one look in the bathroom mirror and decide that one minute simply isn't going to cut it. That's okay. The owner of the freakishly distorted yellow eye can most certainly wait. I brush my teeth and hair, put on real clothes, and wash my face. I look in the mirror again and decide that this will have to do.

When I open the front door, Edward is standing at the edge of the porch looking out at the empty lot across the street. The increasing wind is ruffling his hair. From the ominous look of the sky behind him, I'd say a storm is in order. He turns to face me.

"I'm sorry to bother you," he says with that formal diction of his, "but we need to talk."

I'm thinking: I don't have anything to say.

But I reply, "Okay."

"Would you walk with me?" he says.

I look pointedly over his shoulder at the sky. When he continues to await my response, I shrug and nod. A little Forks rain never hurt anyone. If it did, no one would live here. We start on a path into the nearby woods.

"Something happened at prom last night," he starts.

A lot of things happened at prom last night.

"Can you be more specific?"

He doesn't respond immediately. I can see that he's uncomfortable. I can see that he doesn't know how to spit out whatever is bothering him. I want him to talk to me so badly I can almost taste it. We come to a fallen log and he stops there. This is probably as good a place as any for a knock-down drag-out, so I sit on the log and wait.

"Something that someone was thinking is concerning."

Ooh, can we possibly be more cryptic and vague?

Let's try.

"And how do you know what that certain someone thought?"

Edward closes his eyes for a second. He lets out a shaky breath as though he's decided to tell me something important. I wonder if this is it. I wonder if Edward and Rosalie are finally together. I wonder if he has stopped by to make sure I don't have the wrong idea after our non-date at prom.

This is what I'm sitting here thinking as I stare at Edward being indecisive.

This is what I'm thinking when Edward drops the bomb.

"I don't expect you to believe me, but I know what everyone in the school thinks. About themselves and everyone else."

I think: Freaky yellow eyes.

I think: Well, sock me sideways. Not telekinesis after all like that book I read. It was telepathy the whole time.

This is not the way I imagined this conversation going in my head last night. The conversation in my head had a lot more name-calling. Down-putting. You know. The stuff I'm great at writing in my head.

I don't think I could have imagined this.

I stare at his freaky yellow eyes. Eyes that, by the way, aren't staring at me back. As usual, they are looking at the ground, at the log, at the sky, at his feet. But he seems sincere. He doesn't seem to be joking.

Let's get our facts straight, shall we?

"You know what everyone thinks."

"Yes."

"Their private thoughts."

"Right."

"Their utmost dreams."

"Correct."

"Their deepest desires."

"If they think about them."

"Was your mom exposed to a weird chemical when pregnant with you?"

"Uh…not that I know of."

I pause for a second to contemplate.

"Then I don't believe you."

He cocks his head. "That's fair. Ask me something you don't think I should know."

Is this a trick question? I can think of a lot of things, but I'm certainly not going to clue him in on those things if he doesn't already know them.

Let's try something…tricksie.

"Surprise me," I say. "Tell me something you don't think I know. About our peers. About any of them."

About me.

Edward looks down at his feet for a second. He takes a deep breath.

"Jessica has had a crush on Mike Newton for forever but has held off making her move because she thinks he's in love with you. Lauren would do almost anything to be head cheerleader next year. Tyler was looking down at his cell phone when he nearly hit you with his car."

"That's easy stuff," I scoff. "You could find out that stuff without reading minds."

Edward's face hardens. Yeah, that's right, pretty boy. I already know about your façade. You can't just flutter your golden eyes at me and expect me to buy this cockamamie bull story. This is probably the most elaborate, misguided, and confusing apology/rejection that I've ever heard. If that's where you're even going with this. I can't tell anymore. Edward takes another breath.

"Jessica's parents have been secretly separated for over a year. She's being more rude than usual in the hope that no one will find out.

"Lauren has mild dyslexia. She's hidden it from her friends all these years but gets tripped up every so often, particularly when making those extra-large cheerleading signs.

"Tyler is on steroids to try and get huge before football season. He's determined to beat out Mike for starting wide receiver."

He pauses for a beat.

"James is planning to kill Rosalie."

Inside, I'm reeling.

"How do you know all this?" I whisper.

I'm thinking: Freaky yellow eyes.

"I told you. I know all this," he says, "because I can read minds." His voice is patient, as though he's explaining something to a small child. "These things that most of your peers think and feel are normal."

I notice how he says _my_ peers.

"But James' mind is not normal."

Define normal.

"He's become obsessed with Rosalie over the years, ever since he went on one date with her in ninth grade while she and Emmett were on a brief hiatus. He's dedicated himself to winning her back."

Edward paces. His arms are very stiff by his side.

"He has a shrine to her in his locker. He had this fantasy of the perfect prom. Him wearing the finest tux. Her wearing a beautiful white dress.

"He would ask her to dance. If she said yes out of pity, he would pull out his grandfather's silver hunting knife and would stab her through the heart."

In my mind, I see bloodstains spreading across a beautiful white dress. I see nearby students screaming and crying. I see Rosalie's pale white face, her mouth open in a small 'o'. I see Lauren crying in the girl's bathroom after a pep rally because everyone made fun of her backwards sign. I see Jessica alienating her former friends (myself included) in an effort to prevent them from finding out about the parents she's ashamed of.

"I couldn't let Rosalie say yes. I had to ask her to dance instead."

Edward turns to me. His yellow eyes gleam.

"I foiled his plan. My action caused a chain reaction in his brain."

That led all the way to James savagely punching lockers, apparently. I remember the cold, blue eyes in my nightmares, and I shudder. I hug my arms close to my body to warm myself against the sudden chill.

"He wants to punish me. He plans to kill Rosalie. If he can't have her, no one can. I may have to stop him."

Edward is tortured. Edward may resort to desperate means to prevent James from hurting his precious Rosalie. This sounds menacing. And dangerous. I'm thinking that the hands that left handprints in Tyler Crowley's van could do wonders with fragile flesh.

I'm thinking: I can't believe I thought he'd come to apologize.

I'm thinking: Why are you telling _me_ this?

"We have to tell the police."

Edward scoffs. "I have no proof."

"We could leave an anonymous tip about the shrine in James' locker."

"Shrines aren't a crime. Open up the lockers of half the girls in school, and you'll see shrines to boy bands or the latest 'it' boy."

Himself included, I'm sure.

"We have to do something."

"I've been down this road before. Humans will not heed my warning if I don't have proof."

I stare at him. He said "humans" as though he is not one. It would be like me saying "Girls are stupid." I'm thinking that a lot of things are finally starting to make sense. I'm thinking: Twilight Zone. I'm thinking about speed, strength, and cold skin. I'm thinking capes and costumes and plastic teeth with incisor fangs. And freaky yellow eyes. There's always something about those freaky yellow eyes…

I'm thinking: Can you read my mind?

I'm thinking: If you can, would shooting me now be too much to ask?

I'm thinking: My dad will help. He is the Chief of Police. I'm his daughter; he'll listen to me. But Edward does not look encouraged. His expression does not change. Almost as though he can't hear me.

This makes me doubt his story. This makes him seem crazier than I already think he is. This is me trying mentally to get a rise out of Edward.

Still no change in Edward's expression.

"I will have to stop him myself," Edward muses, more to himself now than to me. "It will be very easy."

Either Edward has ignored my internal monologue or there's something he's not telling me.

"Is there something you're not telling me?"

* * *

What Edward is not telling me is that, out of all the minds in the world, mine is the only one that is not an open book. When he tells me this, I reply that it's likely because my train of thought never left the station. My mind is a blank slate. I'm the mental equivalent of a dull-eyed cow chewing its cud.

He doesn't buy it.

"You think enough for the both of us," he mutters.

Did I mention that I suck at compliments? Did I mention I'm relieved? It's one thing to be obsessed with someone and quite another thing to have them know you are.

Behind us, someone approaches. Edward is not surprised.

"I hear you're thinking of killing someone," Alice Cullen says. I have never seen her up close before. I don't know what she's doing here.

"Killing." I look between her and Edward. I'm confused. "Who said anything about killing?"

"Edward is planning his attack now," Alice says breezily. She's looking at her cuticles, clearly unconcerned.

"Do you read minds, too?"

Really, I'm numb to surprise at this moment.

"Oh no," Alice laughs. "I see the future."

Scratch that.

I boggle at this for a while.

"Let me get this straight," I say. "Between a mind-reader and a fortune-teller, we can't figure out a better way to save Rosalie than killing someone?"

"Well," Alice says doubtfully. "Killing is Edward's _modus operandi_. Didn't he tell you?"

"Alice," Edward frowns. "You're jumping ahead. We're not even close to getting to that part yet."

"Ah. Sorry."

My mind spins at the implication of their words. But I'm on to something that won't involve killing.

"My dad is the Chief of Police."

This gets their attention.

"I'm listening," Edward says.

"I'm looking," Alice says. Her eyes are unfocused.

"Yes," she says. "It might work."

* * *

It almost doesn't work. We almost don't get there in time. James acts much more quickly than Edward and Alice expected. As the rain drops start to fall, Edward says, "Let's go." He takes my hand, and we run back to his car. I can feel the tension in his arm as he helps me stay upright. We jump in his silver Volvo just as the rain starts to fall in earnest.

Edward calls Rosalie's house, and her mom answers that Rosalie is not there. Some boy with a pony tail came by a few minutes ago, and they went for a drive.

"Why didn't you see this coming?" Edward bites at Alice when he hangs up the phone.

"Psychotic people are hard to predict," she says. "I don't think he knew what he was going to do until he actually did it."

When freaky yellow powers fail, it's time for some good, old-fashioned daddy's girl charm. Edward shoves his phone at me.

"Call your dad."

Charlie picks up on the fourth ring. We are lucky that he remembered to bring his cell phone fishing. Sometimes, after a week of work has been particularly difficult, he doesn't always remember.

I quickly convince Charlie that fiendish plots are afoot. He's my dad, he listens to me. I tell him about James' shrine to Rosalie that I happened to see one day. I tell him about the look on James' face when he punched Rosalie's locker last night.

Charlie shifts into cop mode and asks me a series of questions. As I'm talking to him, I can hear him packing up his gear and getting into his truck. Charlie won't wait until Rosalie has been missing for 24 hours. He and his team will act immediately. But will it be soon enough?

Alice shakes her head at the unspoken question in Edward's eyes.

"Where is James taking her?" Edward growls.

"I can't be sure," she says. "A warehouse. With mirrors. I think some type of gymnastic equipment."

"The Cheer House," I say, and they both turn to look at me. "Rosalie takes cheerleading classes there."

Edward shifts his car into gear. The engine revs.

"Can you tell me how to get there?"

Edward's driving on the way to Port Angeles? Nothing. Edward's driving in the rain down muddy side roads to rescue Rosalie from a psychotic killer? Something. I close my eyes and trust in the powers behind his freaky yellow eyes. I trust that we won't get there too late.

Faster than I could have imagined, we're pulling up in front of a slightly dilapidated old barn that someone has painted in bright reds and yellows to make it look cheerful. The Volvo barely skids to a stop before Edward and Alice have their doors open.

"Stay here," Edward growls.

Of course, as soon as he and Alice are out of sight, I open my car door and follow them into the darkness of the Cheer House. It's not open on Sundays.

When I round the corner of the main entrance, I hear crying and yelling and snarling. I see Rosalie hanging upside down from the rings, her feet and hands tied. A flash of lightning illuminates her tomato face for a second, then she fades back to gloom.

A flash, and I see two figures locked together in front of her. One of them is holding a knife. I'm terrified, my heart is beating out of my chest, but I can't stop scanning the darkness for movement.

Scuffling.

Another flash, and the figures have moved, impossibly fast, up against one of the nearby walls covered in mirror.

Crunching.

Flash: Edward grabs the hair on the top of James' scalp and shoves his head against the mirror. Hard enough to shatter the glass in a halo around the point of impact.

Cracking.

Flash: Alice cuts Rosalie down from the rings. I think she used her teeth to bite through the rope.

Falling.

Flash: Rosalie stares at James with tears streaming down her cheeks.

Sobbing.

Flash: Edward presses James up against the wall. I can see the reflection of his expression even though his back is to me. His eyes are dark, and they meet mine for a moment. His face is twisted in a snarl. For a second, I think he's going to do more to James than merely smash his head up against the mirror.

James is not helping.

"What are you waiting for? Coward," he sneers. He's practically begging for Edward to kill him.

Edward doesn't look at James. He keeps staring at me in the mirror with his freaky dark eyes.

He's looking at me. Not at Rosalie, not at Alice, at me.

And I don't have a clue what he sees.

In the distance, I hear the sound of Charlie's sirens. In one swift movement, Edward pushes James to the ground. He beckons Alice over to come stand guard. When James tries to stand, dainty little Alice snarls at him and presses a dainty little foot against his back. James' cheek slams back into the tumbling mat. He doesn't try to move again.

As I stand looking at the shattered glass wall in front of me, I think that the three of us make a good team. Even though I lack freaky yellow eyes.

Apparently, Edward doesn't think so.

I look across the room and see him and Rosalie kissing.

Her arms are locked around his neck. He's probably giving her the opportunity to express her gratitude. No matter which way I look, I can see their reflection in a different mirror. I bet Edward is the best kisser ever. After all, he knows exactly what you want. Or at least what Rosalie wants.

Lucky Rosalie. I'm sure they'll be very happy together.

Lucky me. As always, the sidekick remains on the sidelines.

Charlie and his team swarm the Cheer House. Charlie asks me if I'm okay. When I nod, he hurries over to Alice and James.

As I turn to leave, I hear Alice call out to me. But I keep walking.

The police will need my statement.

I see Emmett's truck arrive. It skids in the mud. I think: This could get messy. To his credit, Emmett doesn't merely barrel past me. He stops and really looks at me.

"Are you okay?"

My eyes brim with tears, but the rain running down my face serves as the perfect mask to prevent him from seeing me cry.

"I'm fine, actually. Everything is fine."

Where's my "I'm fine" shirt when I need it? He's torn. I make it easy for him.

"Rosalie's waiting for you inside."

I hope this is true, for his sake. I know how hurtful a kiss can be.

I give Charlie's deputy my statement. I lie through my teeth when he asks how we knew where James and Rosalie would be. Then I walk over to open the passenger side of Charlie's police cruiser. Normally I'm uncomfortable riding in his car. But right now, it feels like the only place I have left. I sit in the car, shivering, until the deputy finishes taking everyone's statements.

Charlie slides into the driver's seat. He gives my hand a squeeze before starting the car. I look in the rear view mirror and see that Edward and Alice are watching us drive away.


	5. Chapter 5: Second verse

**------------| Type O Negative, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

Charlie and I are silent on the drive home. He looks over at me occasionally, but he doesn't ask me any questions.

"Let me know if you need anything," he says gruffly as I trudge up the stairs to my room.

Yes, I need something. I need someone to talk to. I need a strong shoulder to cry on. I need a broad chest to pound my fists against. But I also need to get real. I need to focus on what really matters here. I need to turn back time. I need to get over the superhero already.

But Charlie can't give me any of these things, so I don't let him know what I need. Instead, I walk into my room and close the door and lie on the bed and sleep.

I'm not up in time for school on Monday. I've been awake since 6:00 a.m., but I can't muster up the energy to swing my legs over the side of the bed. My room is unnaturally bright.

At 7:30 a.m., Charlie knocks softly at my door. "Bells," he says. He doesn't open the door. "I let the principal know you're staying home today."

"Okay," I say. I don't know if he can hear me—the comforter over my head muffles my voice—but I hear the clunk of his boots down the stairs and onto the linoleum of the kitchen.

I hear the front door close and lock and the sound of Charlie's car driving away. I should feel relieved but…I don't really feel much of anything. I sleep again until the sun's insistent rays flood my eyelids.

I pass the day reading in the backyard in the uncharacteristic sun, devouring down-to-earth books about human people who have normal struggles over life and love. As I read, I think that everything looks brighter and fresher after a storm. And after life-altering events, I suppose.

The rest of the week passes slowly. I'm very quiet. My hoodie and ear phones are out in full force.

"She's in shock," I hear Charlie tell someone on the phone one evening.

I don't think that's it, but I'm too tired to argue.

Edward and Alice are not in school Monday or Tuesday. I tell everyone they've gone camping to unwind from their ordeal over the weekend. I have to tell everyone this because I'm Miss Popular in Rosalie's absence. I'm the only official source for information about Edward and Rosalie before, during, and after prom.

Don't I feel super special?

When the Cullens are back in school on Wednesday, I get the impression that Edward wants to talk to me. I get this impression because, everywhere I look, there he is.

What is this sudden interest?

Wednesday morning, he's leaning against my locker. I leave him with my own impression of a cold shoulder and head to my first class sans my correct books.

If he needs something from me, he's going to have to come get it.

At lunch, he's waiting at the door to the cafeteria. He grabs my shirt sleeve and draws me off to the side.

"Sit with me?" he says in a low voice.

"Sorry, I already have plans." I brush past him and sit in the remaining seat at Jessica Stanley's table. She's surprised, but she seizes the opportunity to pry for details about prom. Of course, half the student population had seen Edward in my general vicinity at prom, so there is plenty of speculation.

I'm surprised that I'm not receiving death threats considering the fanfare that had surrounded Edward's crowning ceremony. Although I am receiving more than my share of death glares.

Jessica wants to know how Edward asked me to prom, what we talked about, and if I were jealous of Rosalie. I'm well aware that prying ears and—worse—minds are listening when I answer her rapid-fire questions. If I turn my head slightly to the left, I could look at the Cullens' table.

But I don't. Someone at the Cullens' table won't like what I'm about to say.

I tell her that Edward practically bribed me to go with him to prom because he didn't really want to go with anyone but Rosalie. I tell her that Edward is a man of few words and that one of them is "Rosalie." I tell her that I'm happy for Rosalie and the way she attracts obsessive creeps (Emmett not included).

I can't fight the pull of freaky yellow eyes any longer. I look over at Edward's table, and he's frowning at me. Slightly.

Jessica is frowning as well. Something that I'm saying doesn't jive with the image of Edward that she has in her mind. I know the feeling. She'll get over it, likely by reminding herself that Edward is too hot to be weird.

After gym, Edward is standing by the events bulletin board. I'm always in a particularly bad mood after gym—for obvious reasons—but the look on Edward's face sends me over the edge. I've seen this smirk before, and I know what it means.

"Were you _watching_ me?!"

He tries to play dumb. "I was standing here the whole time."

Nice try. Too bad I know your little secret.

"If you _ever_ watch others watching me in gym again, I'll tell Rosalie that you're more obsessed with her than James was. And that you wear Transformers boxers."

His smile grows annoyingly wider.

"Worth it."

I take a quick mental inventory of the events of gym and nearly cringe when I recall several that involve me either knocking myself or other people down in a flurry of legs and elbows.

I decide that a rapid change of subject is in order.

"Shouldn't you, I don't know, be nursing Rosalie back to health or something?"

"I'm sure Emmett can handle it."

Ha. As if Edward doesn't already know exactly when Emmett is with her and what he and Rosalie talk about. You'd think with that much inside information the boy could orchestrate a more rapid break-up. A couple of choice remarks designed exclusively to prey on their respective insecurities should do the trick.

But we've been standing here long enough, I'm not supposed to be talking to him, and I have to get to my next class.

"Gotta go," I say and execute another cold-shoulder maneuver. This time, Edward takes two steps to block me from edging around him.

"I need to talk to you."

I throw up my hands up.

"What is it this time? Is there some other crisis you think I can help you with? Let me save you some trouble. Call my dad."

He blinks, but continues, "I think you're in shock."

"You and everybody else. Can't you just have Alice take a peek at my future to see that you and Charlie are worried about absolutely nothing?"

Before Edward can respond, Eric drapes his arm over my shoulders. I swear this is pretty much the only type of interaction that Eric and I ever have—he goes for the shoulder drape, and I step out from under it.

"You going to Newton's party this weekend?" Eric drawls in my ear.

Edward's eyes narrow slightly. He's looking at Eric's arm like it's a snake. Cue the step out from under Eric's arm part.

"Mike just had a party," I say flatly.

"This is an after prom party."

"Not a costume party?"

"Not that I know of. Unless you're looking for another excuse to wear the bumblebee."

Wow, good guess.

"Okay," I say. "I'll have to check my schedule."

"Bella," says a new voice. It's Mike. I think he's emboldened by Eric's presence. "Want to be my date to the party?"

Edward's eyes narrow even farther as he watches my face.

"Sure," I say. "Pick me up at 7."

Mike and Eric's jaws drop. Edward turns his face away, and I nearly smirk at his expression. I'm sure Mike's thoughts are particularly enjoyable right now. I use this distraction to make my escape.

It's definitely time for Edward to see me in the arms of another for a change.

After that, Edward gives up trying to talk to me directly, perhaps finally sensing that I'm serious in my desire to avoid him. However, I keep seeing him a bit too close, as though we're still connected by that stupid invisible rope. To make matters worse, I find myself having to watch what I say to other people, including Angela.

It's exhausting. And irritating. And I don't know how much more of this I can take.

Maybe I shouldn't take any more.

Maybe I should just get out of here and let everyone get on with the natural course of their lives.

Maybe I can resign my sidekick commission.

After all, Renee has been bugging me to come visit…

* * *

Charlie invites me to go fishing with him on Saturday. He doesn't want to leave me alone.

"I could drop you by Billy's. I'm sure Jacob wouldn't mind entertaining you today."

Maybe we could make mud pies.

"I actually have some reading to do for Lit class."

"Then maybe we could go out with the Blacks for supper—"

"Actually, there's this party I want to go to tonight."

_Want _is a strong word, but what I _don't_ want is another evening spent in the presence of my dad's friends.

As per the unwritten parenting manual, Charlie grills me about the party but again seems satisfied that Mike Newton is involved. He's especially pleased that Mike is coming to pick me up. I'm not overly fond of the boy, but he sure can come in handy. In more ways than one, as I find out later that night.

* * *

Mike is early picking me up, and he's decked out in his best "preppy" outfit, replete with little gelled spikes on his forehead.

"You look nice," he says, and I have to choke back my laughter. I've been wearing this same pair of jeans for the last several days and didn't feel like diversifying tonight.

I'm feeling free and easy because, ever since I've started thinking about getting out of Forks for real, I feel like the monkey is finally off my back.

I know this is the right thing to do.

I've made my decision.

I'm leaving Forks.

Angela will miss me, but Ben will help her get over it. Renee wants me to come visit for the summer, but I think I can do better than that. Jacksonville sounds like an idyllic place for a senior year of high school.

And this is an excellent time to accelerate my plans.

I've played my part. I helped the superhero save the day and get the girl. I don't need to stick around for their happily ever after.

When we arrive back at his house, Mike plays the good little host and makes the rounds to get the party jumpstarted since his absence. Lightning rounds is more like it. He spends the absolute minimum amount of time with each key person. Claps people on the back in passing, presses little red cups into their hands so quickly they often spill, and cuts several people off mid-sentence with a "Thanks for coming!" before rushing on.

He's in a mad dash around the room, and the finish line is the couch upon which I sit.

I watch him because I refuse to think about Edward. I'm not thinking about Edward even as he steps in the room. Or as he skulks along the wall for a few minutes. Or when he comes to sit by me on my couch.

"Hi," he says, looking down at his feet.

"Where's Rosalie?" I fire at him.

I already know the answer to my question. On Friday, I heard Emmett say something about a fancy Italian restaurant in Seattle now that Rosalie is feeling better.

Edward frowns at the carpet and shrugs. His shoulder brushes mine slightly.

"How's the date going?" he fires back.

"Super," I say.

"I still need to talk to you," he says.

It's not really a question, so I don't really have to answer. Besides, he hadn't really answered mine. I know that he knows where Rosalie is. How can he not with that whole mind-reading business?

Across the room, Mike is staring at us in dismay. As quickly as he can, Mike edges his way back to me and sits down on the other side of me on the couch. I'm a Bella sandwich.

"Why don't we head down to the basement?" Mike says to me.

"Yes, let's," Edward agrees too quickly in an overly pleasant voice. Mike frowns at Edward, and they both stand up and tower over me for a second.

Why should I follow? Why not? It's not like anything that happens tonight will matter anyway. This is my final hurrah; I should live it up.

A few minutes later, I'm downstairs in the Newton's basement for take two of a lame activity. My plan is to observe said lame activity and make fun of the people who willingly choose to partake in it.

My plan fails.

Somehow, Edward works his beautiful person voodoo on me.

"Please," he says, in the kind of voice that you'd jump off a cliff for.

Despite myself, Edward's words and eyes convince me to take the blindfold that Mike is offering so helpfully. There's something about Edward's face that makes me take the blindfold.

I put it on and allow myself to be led to the closet. While I wait in the closet, I listen to the commotion outside the door as a name is drawn from the magician's black top hat. I listen to someone groan. I'm pretty sure it's Mike.

The person whose name was magically pulled out of a hat opens the closet door and steps in. The door closes behind him.

I peek through the crack at the bottom of the blindfold and see a pair of leather shoes. They look ridiculously expensive. Immediately, I rip off the blindfold. I don't want the owner of those shoes to get the wrong idea here. I just wanted to see if he would go through with it. If he would use his freaky powers to beat out Mike for a chance in the closet.

With me.

"Short end of the stick, huh?" I try to lighten the mood.

"What?" Edward startles. He's confused, and I chalk it up to the fact that he usually depends on the mental source rather than the verbal filter. He's standing as far away as the closet allows, his back to the door. As usual, he's not quite looking at me.

"More like seven minutes in hell. We should at least throw some things around to give a good show."

I look around idly for something that will make a nice "thump." I see a hammer and some nails.

"You're not the short end of the stick." Edward is scowling at me.

I pick up the hammer and heft it, trying it on for size.

"I am if the other stick is Rosalie."

I decide that a hammer is not the safest of instruments in my hands. I put it back down.

As I'm putting the hammer down, Edward says something important.

Pay attention.

"Rosalie is the most narcissistic, self-centered, vain human I've ever met," Edward says, looking vaguely at the nearby shelf as though he's telling me that the weather is fair.

My first thought: I would probably have appended "selfish" and "egotistical." That's me, the walking thesaurus.

My second thought: Wait, what?

Rewind.

Did Edward just say something negative about the object of his affection?

Edward? Thought Rosalie was vain?

If I were an old-timey robot with a square body, this would be one of those times where I'd be walking in circles waving my accordion arms and saying "Do not compute" in an eerie monotone.

Someone conk the robot on the head, please.

I backpedal slightly in my assessment of Edward, really looking at him as he continues gazing at the paint can on the shelf.

Clearly, Edward is more capable than expected of rational thought. Or perhaps he has a thing for narcissism, like that one story in Greek mythology of the man who fell in love with his own reflection in a lake.

For all I know, he is a narcissist himself. Maybe he carries his own personal mirror in his back pocket and checks his hair in reflective surfaces. It would certainly explain his perfect coiffure.

Speaking of reflective surfaces, an image in one is not supporting what Edward is trying to tell me here.

"You kissed her," I accuse.

Edward's eyes fly to my chin, and he frowns.

"She kissed _me_."

I'm thinking: You traded lab tables for her. You asked to be her lab partner. You danced with her at prom. You tense when she comes into a room. You saved her from her worst nightmare. You let her kiss you even though you could see it coming a mile away.

"Eh," I say. "Tomayto, tomahto."

Edward looks down with concentration. I've seen this face before, when he's around other people. He's listening. He's trying to read my mind.

He fails.

"She was distraught. She didn't know what she was doing." He's flailing, trying to say something that I will approve of.

I say nothing.

"I think you have the wrong idea."

You can't read my mind. How would you know?

"It does not matter." I say this with finality.

"Why not?"

"I'm leaving Forks."

His jaw clenches at an even sharper right angle.

"Where are you going?"

"Jacksonville."

"Jacksonville is a long way from Forks."

"It's almost the longest way from Forks in the continental United States."

I know. I've checked.

"Jacksonville is too sunny."

I smile at him.

"And that's a bad thing why?"

He scowls. He doesn't answer my question. Instead, he takes a step forward and raises his eyes to mine for the first time.

Edward looks at me.

Really looks at me.

His eyes are intense. They are not freaky. They are devastatingly dazzling.

Consider me dazzled.

Devastatingly.

Finally I understand the glazed looks I've seen from our classmates, teachers, and waitresses when Edward turns his eyes on them. I can see why they give him whatever he wants. It is entirely unfair of him to turn his superpowered gaze on me. Superheroes only using their powers for good and all that. Those eyes, they should be an illegal substance.

My hand brushes a box of matches, and they fall to the floor. He blinks at the sound, and I immediately look over at the purple paint can. I can see why he was looking at it earlier. It is the most fascinating thing I've ever laid eyes on.

"Bella," he says, and my flesh comes alive at the sound of my name coming from those lips.

Is it wrong that I know this is the first time he's ever said my name?

"Don't leave," he says.

I'm reading the name on the paint can over and over. Plum Passionate is what it's called.

I'm trying hard to convince myself that this is a perfectly natural conversation for a superhero to be having with his sidekick.

Edward cups my chin between two fingers and directs my eyes back to his face.

It won't do for his sidekick to be nearly a continent away.

He places one arm on the shelf behind me, then the other. He's encircling me with his arms. He's standing very close.

Physically preventing me from leaving.

I've almost convinced myself.

Then he whispers, "May I kiss you now?"

I close my eyes. He takes that as a yes. I should have said no.

"Be very still," he says, and I'm thinking: handprints.

Cold lips on my chin. He sculpts my jaw with his lips. They're cold, but I don't feel cold. Now those lips are on my neck.

I hold very still. I know that I should say something. That I should remind him that I'm his sidekick. That the hero never falls for the sidekick. That he's in love with the longer end of the stick.

He's working my neck now, and my vocal chords don't work. My arms tremble at my sides. He sucks for a moment on the throbbing pulse in my neck. He pulls back, inhaling softly between his teeth.

I'm supposed to hold still, but I can't. His mouth is very near mine. I tilt my head just so, and I'm kissing the side of his mouth, that soft, pliable area that's not quite cheek but is not yet lip.

He stops breathing.

"Bella, I can't…" He says this nearly into my mouth. We're breathing the same air. Then he moves his head just so, and we're full-on kissing.

Our lips part with the force of the kiss, he pulls me closer, and my fingers tangle his hair.

This is me giving him all I've got.

This is him trying to prove that I'm not the short end of the stick.

For a single moment, I almost forget that this isn't about me.

Suddenly, violently, he pulls back and is gone. I open my eyes to see him off to the side, his eyes squeezed shut, his face tight as though he's fighting something. Nausea, perhaps? The distance between our skin is staggering. I sag against the shelf behind me. I look at his face, and I think that I repulse him.

He came. He kissed. He was repulsed.

He remembered that he wasn't kissing the heroine after all.

"You should go," he says roughly. He doesn't open his eyes. "Right now."

His tone is dangerous. Menacing. I'm thinking plastic teeth and handprints. I can't see his freaky yellow eyes, but I know they're underneath, hidden.

I think: Jacksonville, here I come.

I take two steps and fling open the closet door. The partiers are surprised to see me. Only five minutes have passed. It seems like a lifetime.

They recover quickly. Jeers and catcalls follow me as I push through the crowd. I avoid Angela's concerned eyes. I find Mike's round, sad baby face. Here's something that will cheer him up. I walk right up to him and grab his wrist.

"Wanna get outta here?" I say.

In mute rapture, he allows me to lead him away. Told you that Mike would come in handy. I look back for a second to see the throng converging on the closet to congratulate Edward. Over their heads, I can see him, standing still, his face tight. But his freaky eyes are staring right at me, and they're black as night.

No matter. I'm gone.

* * *

Mike takes me straight home. His initial euphoria at the destination he's obviously imagining quickly wears off when I direct him back to my house. He stops trying to talk to me when I don't talk back. We pull into my driveway. Charlie left the porch light on for me. We sit for a second, and then Mike looks over at me hopefully.

"You want me to beat him up for you?"

What is it with guys asking me this in relation to Edward? I think of poor Mike going up against freaky yellow eyes. About that day in the lunch line when Tyler Crowley didn't dare intrude on our conversation. About the halo of cracks expanding from James' head as he was pushed into a mirror.

About how Edward has killed before.

I smile weakly at Mike. "No, thanks."

I get out of the car. Mike leans out his window.

"If you need anything…," he says. I know he means it.

I nod and go inside.

As I lie in bed and not sleep, I try and match up the events of the past few months with the feeling of Edward's body pressed up against mine in a closet.

None of this makes any sense.

We're not even friends.

Sure, I kinda sorta have a thing for him, but none of his actions over the past two months have given me any indication that he sees me as anything but his Bio partner. And an unwanted Bio partner at that.

When you like someone, you usually smile at them, seek out ways to be close to them, find excuses to work with them on projects, dance with them at social events—all things that Edward has done in relation to Rosalie, not me. Even the things that Edward did in relation to me (such as playing the bumblebee song) were things he did in Rosalie's presence. Forget seven degrees of separation, I'll bet I can achieve one or two at most degrees of separation between Edward's actions over the past two months and how they relate to Rosalie.

As they say, all paths lead back to Rome. And Rosalie.

Perhaps he merely feels an inexplicable physical attraction to me. The allure of my lips is just too strong for him to resist.

No, that's not it. I've seen me. I've seen my lips. There's nothing irresistible about either.

Here's a better theory:

Edward's getting tired of Rosalie's hot and cold routine. He knows her thoughts; he knows exactly what she's doing; he knows she's giving him just enough attention to keep him warm in case Emmett finally realizes he could do so much better. Edward's tired of being her holla back boy, so he needs someone else to help him get over Rosalie. Someone who's so completely the opposite of blonde, busty, and beautiful that he won't be reminded of Rosalie. Someone who he can use as shock therapy to rid his body of Rosalie's toxins.

Someone he's not friends with. Someone who's not all gaga over him. Someone who won't get the wrong idea.

Someone like me.

Check, check, and check mate.

Yes, this makes sense.

It's the only thing that does.

Thing is, I'm not interested in being his rebound.

I'm sure he can find some other willing girl to oblige.

Problem solved.

Now on to the next item on the agenda: making plans. Making plans, you see, is easier than thinking and feeling. I plan how I'm going to tell Charlie that I'm leaving. I imagine the arguments he'll use and what I'll say to counter them. I plan how I'll get to the airport and what I'll say to Renee when I call her. I imagine the look on her face when I see her again for the first time. I can only hope that things will go better now that we're both older.

I fall asleep, still planning. My sleep is fitful because my dreams are filled with plans and with Edward Cullen and his golden eyes. In my dreams, he's fighting to convince me not to go to Jacksonville. But I know that I have to leave now or I'll never get out. In my dreams, Edward has an iron hand clamped on my wrist. I'm trying to run, but my body is even more sluggish and slow than normal.

I wake up in a cold sweat. I stifle a shriek as I see movement out of the corner of my eye.

A flash of white.

But it's just my curtains, blowing in a slight breeze from a crack in the window. My room is colder than normal, and the sound of the rain unfiltered by glass must have woken me. I don't remember leaving my window open last night before going to bed, but I'm too exhausted to care.

* * *

On Sunday, I tell Charlie that I'm leaving Forks. It's early, and he's packing up to go fishing.

We've had this discussion before, the summer before sixth grade when I asked to go live with my mom. He didn't push me very hard to change my mind then; I think he feels guilty that he gets to spend so much time with me and that I've grown up without the influence and guidance of a mom.

It's a little different this time, as I'm asking to leave before I've finished the school year.

"Can't you stick it out a few more weeks?"

"I'm sure they'll let me finish my classes via correspondence."

"I don't know…"

"I want some time in the sun." He still seems skeptical, so I throw in my trump card, "I want to feel safe."

As expected, that does it. My dad has spent over twenty years dealing with all sorts of difficult familial situations throughout the county, including abuse and rape. He's seen the emotional damage that traumatic events can cause. He's been concerned about me this week. I think he was even talking daily to Renee.

I seal the deal by offering to go fishing with him, one last time. He was supposed to go with Billy, but I hear him make a quick call while I'm getting dressed. We drive past the Black's house without stopping on our way to the creek. I almost tear up as I realize Charlie probably wants some final time alone with me.

Just like when I was little, Charlie helps me set up my pole. We sit together under the clouds and talk about the past. We laugh at the funny things that we've seen in this town and reminisce about all the good times we've had. I joke that he'll finally have space on the bathroom counter for his shaving stuff.

We avoid talking about the future.

He doesn't even protest when I gently lower any fish that we catch back into the river.

* * *

That afternoon, I've packed most of my stuff, and it's time to say my goodbyes.

Like Charlie, I'm not slow to act after I've made a decision. I only have a few people I want to say goodbye to in person, and most of them are fairly easy. Angela is the most distraught, but she hides it well. At least she has Ben.

I catch Mike, Tyler, and Jessica together in the diner. Mike and Tyler seem to go into shock when I tell them the news, but Jessica more than makes up for their non-reaction. She hugs me and cries and says that she will miss me so much. She tells me that we're sure to be the best of friends if ever I come back and that she'll come visit me in Florida. As I leave, I see that she is holding Mike's hand. I'm sure she'll be a great comfort to him in his time of need.

Now, I'm standing in front of the final house on my list. I didn't really want this house to be on the list, but Nellie seemed to have a mind of her own in bringing me here.

Edward's mom answers the door. Somehow, she's not surprised that it's me.

"What a pleasant surprise," she says. "Come in. Make yourself at home."

"Is Edward here? He's expecting me."

Well, he is now.

"Yes. Go right on up. Third door on the right." She busies herself with whatever she was doing, but I can feel her eyes on my back as I walk carefully up the stairs.

The door to Edward's room is closed. I know it's his room because I hear the soft strains of _Claire de Lune_ filtering through the door. It fits; I can see Edward as a classical music type of guy.

I also hear thumps and a muffled curse.

Just as I'm about to knock, the door opens, and Edward is standing right in front of me. I almost laugh because his hair is messier than usual. And is that a dirt smudge on his cheek?

"Your shirt is on inside out," I say as I push past him into his room.

He looks down and sees the tag sticking out from his neck. I have never seen Edward embarrassed before, but I do now.

"I was not expecting you. My room was a wreck."

I wonder if he often sits around in a messy room half naked.

I look around while he discreetly fixes his shirt. I see a flash of pale white skin in my peripheral vision. His room is spotless. His journals (or what I assume are journals) are stacked neatly and color-coded. An absurdly large music collection is arranged in perfect rows. And are those eight tracks and a phonograph I see?

The only evidence of former disarray is a single sock sticking out from under his…couch. To me, it looks too uncomfortable to be an actual bed. He smiles slightly when he sees me looking down at the sock.

"Come to say goodbye?" he asks. And he's doing that thing where he's looking right at me again.

And now it's my turn not to meet his eyes. I notice that he doesn't have any shoes on. Or socks. Hence the errant sock under the couch.

"Yeah," I say. I'm thinking about pinky toes. Bare feet and Edward don't jive in my mind. I have only ever pictured him in his expensive Italian loafers.

"I'd rather not," he says.

I'm distracted by bare flesh, but I eventually realize that Edward's statement implies he doesn't want to say goodbye.

He's says, "Let's go for a drive instead."

Uh…

Do how?

I watch his feet disappear into his socks. Then into his ridiculously shiny, expensive shoes.

"Where to?" Inside, my heart pounds just a tad hard.

"Oh, I don't know." He looks up at me almost deviously. "Florida?"

I say the first thing that comes to mind.

"I don't have most of my stuff."

He takes that as a yes. He stands up and grabs his gray pea coat from a nearby chair.

"You won't need it."

I go: ???

He grabs my hand and pulls me, unresisting, down the stairs.

This is not how I'd planned this goodbye.

Edward's dad pokes his head out of his study as we pass.

In fact, this doesn't seem like a goodbye at all.

"Be back later," Edward says vaguely to his dad.

His dad merely smiles a secret smile. I see the smile mirrored on his mom's face as we pass her as well. She waves and looks a little too ecstatic for doing laundry.

"What about Nellie?" I ask as he directs me around her.

His fingers flutter dismissively toward Nellie. "Alice will take her home for you."

I'll bet Alice won't be able to find my spare key. Although, come to think of it, maybe I shouldn't bet against Alice.

Edward pulls me to his car. He holds the passenger door open for me as I get in.

I'm thinking: Road trip.

I'm thinking: We couldn't last five minutes in a closet. Can we last five days in a car?


	6. Chapter 6: Next stop nowhere

**------------| Type O Negative, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

I would love nothing more than to tell you that Edward and I spend a wonderful three days bonding through deep conversations, talking about the traumas of our past, and professing our undying love for each other.

But it's not that simple. I don't do simple.

What actually happens is that Edward and I are silently awkward. Edward has kidnapped me, and I realize that there's nowhere I can run, nowhere I can escape, no Nellie to save me this time. I have absolutely no idea why I agreed to his "drive."

Try as I might, I can't relate this kidnapping back to Rosalie.

The boy planned this. He's got me right where he wants me—we're sardines in a silver can. The problem is, this is not really where I want me. This is not how the story is supposed to go.

It's supposed to go like_ this_: Faithful sidekick—smock, goggles, and all—comes up with a last-minute solution to help save the superhero in the face of danger (check). The sidekick helps the hero and heroine get together in a passionate kiss/embrace scene (check). The hero and heroine go to a party together and make out passionately for seven minutes in a closet while the sidekick realizes she's been in love with the woefully under-appreciated Mike Newton all along. (And here's where the script broke down on us.)

The superhero absolutely cannot fall for the sidekick. It destroys the whole epic-ness of the mythos. The pacing of the story. The flow. The undeniable order of the universe. After all, where does that leave the heroine? Hanging upside down from a pair of rings while the blood pools in her head and her veins pop out to mar her previously unblemished façade? How rude.

Funny, but rude.

So I decide that a bit of denial is in order. Some silence, perhaps. I've often found that silence can be a great ally when it comes to denial.

Therefore, I don't say a word for the first two hours of the drive. I watch the passing blur change from living green to dying brown the farther we get from the lush Olympic peninsula and into the deserts of eastern Washington. I watch as the prospects of my own happy ending shrivel up and die with the scenery the longer the silence stretches.

After a while, Edward starts reciting random facts to try and engage me.

"Did you know that the average human male thinks about sex every five seconds?" he says.

"Males and females often think completely opposite thoughts in reaction to the same stimuli," he says.

And no, these are not his first attempts to get us talking. But after he realizes that I'm not feeling chatty, he gets creative.

He desperately wants to talk to me. But I have absolutely nothing to say. I can feel myself shutting down. Too much has happened in the last 24 hours.

Two too many kisses and two too many rejections.

I notice immediately that Edward isn't big on silence. Something having to do with the fact that he's not used to it. I'll bet it's killing him that he can't hear every little brain fart that I produce.

Hour three, and he's all, "Please say something. Anything."

The thing about silence is that, once you've let it in, it's hard to get rid of it. It's been a constant companion all my life, an inheritance from my taciturn father. It's enveloping me in a silver Volvo. I'm getting smothered by silence and there's nothing Edward or I can do to stop me from drowning in it.

His hands are fisted around the steering wheel. I could probably see his white knuckles if they weren't covered in black leather. Oddly, Edward is wearing driving gloves. I stare at his fingers encased in pliable leather for a long, long time.

He looks over at my face occasionally. He's worried, but he doesn't know what to do. I don't know what to do, either.

This isn't going according to plan.

"Say the word, and I'll turn around," he says. "I'll drive you to the airport myself. We don't have to do this."

But I don't say the word. Any word. My lips can't remember how to form words. The silence has infiltrated my mouth and is stuffed down my windpipe. Instead, I turn my head away from Edward and lean it against the cool glass.

"Tell me what you're thinking," Edward whispers.

What _am_ I thinking?

I'm thinking that Edward has no power over me here in the car where he can't stare at me with his freaky yellow eyes. I'm thinking that cars are the perfect places to hide what you're really thinking because you don't have to look the other person in the eye. You're perfectly positioned to stare straight ahead and have plenty of things to keep your eyes busy and distracted.

I'm thinking: Time. I need time.

"Wait," I say softly, the first hint I've given him that I haven't, in fact, gone completely catatonic. The effort involved in grinding out even that syllable is monumental.

Upon hearing that single word, Edward closes his mouth and does his best impression of a statue. No doubt he can wait better than any person I know. He does everything better than any person I know.

* * *

After more hours, we stop at a gas station to refuel the Volvo. I'm not really interested in food (now is one of those times I feel like I really don't deserve it), but Edward returns from the convenience store with a veritable Noah's ark of snacks—literally two of every kind.

"I didn't know what you'd want," he says curtly as he hands a heavy brown bag to me.

Way to buy one of everything, then. But, of course, I don't speak. I grab some chocolates instead.

Edward drives through the night. I don't think he planned it that way, and I can see him eying several promising hotels as we pass them. But he doesn't stop. He probably just wants us to get there sooner. He probably regrets ever getting in this car.

As we drive, I try to sleep. My consciousness skips across time like a smooth rock on a pond.

Day two, and the silence has filled up all the empty space in the car until there's no room for anything else.

I tell myself: I helped him. Why can't I let him help me?

I wanted to hate Edward so badly. I didn't ask to know his secrets. I didn't ask him to save me. I wanted him to save his heroine. I wanted him to be happy with her. I was fine with being the sidekick.

But sometimes, in life, you don't get what you want. We're driving toward a little town in the middle of nowhere, and it's time. Time to stop being quiet. Time for me to tell Edward what I want and see if he wants the same.

Edward has been driving for 20 hours straight with only quick breaks for gas, but his eyes remain clear and his posture alert. I, on the other hand, have not fared as well. I'm stiff from trying to sleep upright. I can feel that my hair is a tangled mess on my head and…

"I need a shower."

* * *

Edward cuts the Volvo into an exposed little hotel in Nebraska. I'd forgotten that was even a state. The Volvo points to identical hotel room doors, all lined up in a row, waiting to be chosen. They all look the same, but don't be fooled. One of these doors is different than the others. One of these doors opens into a room where Edward and I are going to be alone, truly alone, far away from our lives and Forks and Rosalie.

Edward gets out of the car, but I don't follow.

I can't.

I can't because I have this thing about hotel rooms. If things were awkward in his car, I can only imagine how awkward it will be in another box, this time one in which neither of us has anything to do. Nothing to do but sit and feel the pressure of the conveniently soft and horizontal surface nearby.

We've been driving toward this destination, this resolution for two days. We're at our destination now, nothing to do, nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. No passing scenery to keep our attention.

The lobby doors swallow Edward up.

Maybe if I don't get out of the car, I can pretend that I don't have to do this. That we're not really here and that I don't really need that shower after all. We've been driving so long, it feels like the car is still moving, so it's easy to pretend that our journey continues. It's easy to pretend that I'm safe and cocooned in my blanket of silence, and nothing and no one can really touch me.

The lobby doors spit Edward back out. He hesitates when he sees me still hunkered down in front seat. I try not to watch him as he rounds to the passenger door. My door opens, and he's unbuckling my seatbelt for me, slowly, gently like he's working over a cornered animal. Then an arm is around my back, and he's lifting me from the car.

"Let's get you that shower," he says quietly and motions for me to follow.

And I do. I keep pace with him and watch his stiff shoulders. I contemplate how different it is to be here in the wake of those shoulders instead of being off to the side, rocked by their passing.

Then we stop in front of one of the little red doors.

I wonder what's behind door number 108.

We're about to find out.

The door swings open, and Edward strides forward to deposit his keys. He sits down on the single, king-sized bed. I walk over and stand by the wall, like I always do. The feeling of something protecting my back and propping me up is comforting. Safe.

Is this close enough? Yeah, for now. I take a deep breath. The air dislodges the silence from my lungs, my throat, my mouth.

And I say, "We should probably talk."

Edward merely nods.

I say, "Do you want to know what I've been thinking for the last couple of months?"

"You know I do."

He wants to know, but I don't know if I _want_ him to know. I don't know if I can handle giving him the guided tour of my convoluted mind. I don't think he'll like what he sees; I don't think he'll enjoy clawing through the cobwebs or ducking under stalagmites of long-ago crystallized emotion.

He can't read me at all, and that fact is so foreign to him that I'm sure he's expecting to see something unique and glamorous to accompany the anomaly.

But I'm just me.

I told him once that there's no one home up here, and he said that I think plenty. He said so because he's intrigued by what he can't see; it's tantalizingly out of his reach. But what will happen when I bring it in reach? When I expose my mundane thought processes that stretch out monotonously like a perfect grid of infinitely straight city blocks? Will he realize that he's seen it all before? When I tell him how I feel about him, how I feel when I'm around him, will he turn away, disappointed by my clichéd fantasies that he's seen echoed in the minds of hordes of women throughout his life?

I'm like a two-year-old showing my first finger-painting to Picasso here.

I'm playing a Chopsticks concert for Mozart.

I'm a girl who loves a boy, afraid to show him the truth for fear he won't love her back.

So I figure that the only way to do this is to just do it. Lay it all out there, let it all hang out, and get the rejection over with. Quick, like ripping off a band-aid. Me, I know all about band-aids.

But where to begin? This time, I'll start at the beginning.

The day I first met Edward.

Nothing before that matters.

So I begin.

"From the first moment I saw you, I wanted to hate you. You represent everything that I despise—superficiality, wealth, popularity."

I haven't cried in years, but I think I might now.

"I wanted to hate you, but I couldn't because I knew your secret. I don't know how, but I did. I can tell you wear a mask to try and hide who you really are. I couldn't hate you because I wanted so much to believe in you. I wanted so much to believe that people like you exist. That heroes live among us."

Confusion, desperation, and hope are all painted across his features in wide strokes that overlap and blend together into one devastating canvas.

"Then you saved me from the van, and I started to hope. I wondered…could you save me from myself? But you went out of your way to avoid me. What is wrong with me that you can't stand to be in the same room with me?"

Tears are moving, exposed, down my face. I glance up through wet lashes, and Edward's eyes are agonized. His lips are parted as though to speak, but he knows I'm not done.

"You were always fleeing from me, and you were going straight to her. I thought that maybe if I helped you get her, we could be friends. We could keep bantering; you get my sarcasm; you _get_ me…but you don't want to be around me."

His eyes are closed, his jaw clenched.

"And then you tried to kiss me in a closet…" I hear my voice, and it's shaking so hard I'm surprised he's still following this. My tears are drying, making my cheeks uncomfortably stiff and I still need that shower so that I can cry and the water can wash my tears away.

"And you failed. You came, you kissed, you were repulsed."

His face is tortured. He's just breathing, he wants to say something, but he doesn't know what to say, his vocal chords are frozen.

And I take a step forward and sit on the opposite corner of the bed because my legs are getting too shaky. His eyes follow me, and I don't look at them. I don't want to see pity in his golden eyes. I don't want to see guilt or sadness.

All these things come before rejection, so I keep going, more quickly now.

"The closet was my fault. Your actions have made your feelings clear. I chose to go to that party. I went because I wanted to be where I knew you would be. Because you wanted to talk to me. And I wanted to talk to you. Despite appearances, I like talking to you. I'm tired of pushing you away."

This hurts, but I'm young; my heart will recover. Either way, it's almost over.

"In fact, I more than like talking to you. I'm kinda sorta completely obsessed with you."

Edward's eyes are dangerous, as though this is not what he wanted me to say. This is not what he wanted me to think.

But at least I am no longer silent; I'm hiding nothing. My voice, my face, they're hiding nothing. No sarcasm, no blank stares. "I realize that I'm not even close to being your type. I completely understand if you don't reciprocate. You won't hurt my feelings at all."

I'm trying to prepare myself for the band-aid that's coming off here. I really am.

"So, that's all I've been thinking."

I stand up. Completely exposed, naked, dirty.

"Time for that shower now."

My exit strategy.

See how I planned this?

"Now would be a great time for you to leave."

So I don't have to watch.

This is me, counting my steps as I walk toward my shower.

One, two, three…

He says, "Bella, wait."

I wait, but I don't turn back to look at him.

I can't.

"Please come here."

I can't.

Silence. Then, "You're the one who's running."

He's right. I run, he runs, we both run—but I run more.

"I'm not going anywhere," he says.

I hear the bed creak. I hear footsteps coming toward me.

Then I feel his hands on my shoulders, spinning me slowly, gently, like I'll break if he's not careful. When we're facing each other, he stands with his hands lightly on my shoulders.

"This is wrong," he says, and my stomach plunges to my toes. I can practically feel the edges of the band-aid being peeled up in preparation.

"This is so wrong," he says, and I wait for that band-aid to rip, "but I _want_ you."

And I stand there, completely frozen, my heart pounding so hard it's trying to excavate itself out of my chest.

He says, "I want you more than I've ever wanted anything or anyone in my life."

He says, "Look at me."

But I can't.

He says, "Look at me," and my eyes finally glide up his jaw, his nose. "You say you're obsessed with me? You don't know anything about obsession. I want…no, I _need_ to know every thought that is going through your head."

He says, "It's been agonizing the past few months pretending to ignore you. To have to endure Rosalie's constant mental drivel. To be in the same room with you but not be able to talk to you. To figure out what you're thinking. What makes you blush that alluring pink."

I can feel said blush flooding my cheeks as we speak.

"What makes you bite your lip."

Right now, I very much want to bite _his_ lip.

"I couldn't stay away from you any more if I tried."

As his words sink in, I panic, I'm frozen, I didn't expect this. I couldn't possibly have expected this. He wasn't supposed to reciprocate. The hero never reciprocates.

He says, "Where you are, there I'd like to be. If you'll have me."

He says, "But you, you look like you'd rather be anywhere but here."

And I let out a shaky breath because he's right.

I say, "Sorry," and smile. It's not a strong smile, but it's honest.

His lips curl in response, but, as usual, he doesn't show any teeth.

I look at his lips for a moment more, then I finally raise my eyes to his. His eyes, they are nearly impossible to look into without losing yourself. I mean, I know superheroes are perfect, but this is almost ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised if I spontaneously combusted from the intensity, the heat in his stare. Heat vision, a perfect little red cherry on top for our perfect little hero.

He says, "I need to talk to you, tell you things, but there's one thing I'd like to try again, if you're willing."

His mouth is so close to mine that I would be willing to fly to the moon and back on a single breath of air. And I'm trembling not from the cold or exhaustion but from a combination of nervousness and excitement and anticipation.

I'm trembling because the boy I like likes me back.

And I'm trembling because he's going to kiss me.

Again.

But I can't close my eyes. I remember the last time he tried to kiss me in a small room with four walls. I remember the look on his face after I kissed him back. He hasn't closed his eyes either, and whatever he's reading in mine has made his eyes—those beautiful eyes—fill with something.

A second ago it was hope, need, fire.

Now it's apprehension, hesitation, doubt, fear.

And finally, despair.

I say, "What's wrong?"

His jaw is clenched again, and he's grinding his teeth.

I've seen this look on his face before, in a closet. I know what it means.

"You don't want to."

"I do."

"No, you don't."

"I want to more than anything."

"Then do it."

He snatches away the hand cupping my neck.

He fairly snarls at me, "I _can't_."

He pushes away from the bed and paces like a caged lion in front of me.

He growls, "Too much."

I'm confused, I don't understand, it hurts. He's just spent 20 hours with me in a car? What's so hard about 20 minutes in a hotel room? He sees the pain in my eyes, and he backs up further.

"I need some air," he mutters. His hand on the doorknob, but he hesitates. He looks back at me a final time.

"Who's running now?" I say softly.

But he just looks at me and doesn't answer. I can see that he's torn, but all he says is, "Lock the door behind me." Then he slips through and is gone. I feel a gust of fresh air on my face as he closes the door behind him and then that, too, is gone.

What just happened?

He said he wasn't going to stay away from me. Call me crazy, but it sure looks like where he's going is away.

I get up shakily and draw the deadbolt and the little chain.

I can't help but notice that he didn't add "Be back soon."

Nothing feels real. I'm trying to believe him, to believe that little detail that he could possibly be as obsessed with me as I am about him. I don't want to go back to the time before I knew that he was only pretending. But he's just made it hard.

I laid myself bare before his paralyzing gaze, and he said what I wanted to hear, but something is preventing him from taking the next step. His demons still rage. I thought I knew all his secrets, I thought I had seen the man behind the mask, but maybe I haven't seen anything yet.

It's still his turn to talk, and he'll come back when he's ready. I know he will. I hope he will. Please come back.

Right now I need some down time, some shut off my brain and heart time. Perchance to sleep.


	7. Chapter 7: Midnight swim

**------------| Type O Negative, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

I wake up with start and bolt upright in the middle of the bed. Looking over at the clock, I see that two hours have passed since Edward made his escape. Despite myself, I must have fallen asleep while waiting for him to return.

The lamp is still on, and the door chain is still loosely draped across the door. Edward is not on the couch, in the bathroom, in the closet, or under the bed.

It's the middle of the night.

I'm alone in a strange hotel room.

And I'm starting to panic.

I force myself to breathe. I force myself to swing my legs off the bed. I take the seemingly interminable steps to the door. I draw the chain back with a hiss of metal, then I pop the deadbolt, open the door, and peek my head out slowly.

But I don't really want to look. You try looking down a hotel corridor in the dead of night when you're all alone. The only thing that would make this scene worse is if a little kid flew by me on an alarmingly loud plastic tricycle.

Um.

So now is really not the time to be thinking about horror movies. For several reasons.

I force myself to look one way down the corridor, then the other. I see air in many places, but I don't see Edward getting any. I should probably go check the parking lot for a silver Volvo.

But I can't. I can't because I don't want to leave the safety of the hotel room with its big, fancy locks. I can't because that freaky corridor scene from_ The Shining_ is too vivid in my mind. I can't because I don't want to see an empty parking spot where the Volvo had been.

I just can't do it. Too many people in my life have walked away from me. This time, I don't want to know.

I close the hotel room door and stand with my back to it for a second.

I'll stay here and pretend, at least for the rest of the night, that I'm not alone in a forgettable state in the middle of nowhere. I'll pretend for as many hours as necessary until the sun is baking the concrete again and the hotel halls are filled with other travelers and maids and bell hops rather than the alternative.

Despite my brave thoughts, I feel my leg bones melting. I ride the door like a slow-motion slide until my fall is arrested by the ground. My head is pounding. I claw my way up on the bed and sit in one of my patented Bella balls in the very center, the covers around me a wall to shut out the rest of the world.

I sit very still with my knees clutched to my chest. I don't make a sound until I realize that I'm crying. Tears are streaming, unfettered, down my face.

I haven't cried in years, but I'm making up for it this night.

I'm crying because being along in a hotel room sucks more than annoying plastic tricycles.

I'm crying because my supposed best friend Taylor—who I was madly in love with the year I spent in Phoenix—actually had a crush on the Phoenix High version of Rosalie Hale the whole time.

I'm crying because my mom abandoned me as a baby and continues to show through the little things—like forgetting to pick me up from school or call me on my birthday—that she's incapable of really caring about anyone but herself.

And I'm crying because I've made the biggest rookie sidekick mistake of all—I love a superhero who doesn't love me back.

* * *

I'd like to tell you this time that Edward is going to come back. That he has to come back. I'd like to put us both out of our suspense. I would like this more than anything in the world.

But the thing about the epic story of life is that the ending is not yet written. I thought I knew what the plot was going to be until the hero of the story divulged he has the ability to read minds and that what he reads in Rosalie's mind turns him off. I thought I knew the ending until the hero tells me that he's been only pretending to avoid me.

So I just sit here crying as silently as possible even though there's no one around to hear me. As far as crying jags go, this one is unhelpful. I'm getting nowhere. I don't have a plan.

I slept in a car for two days and my hair is still tangled on my head and I know that if I raise a hand to my face, I'd feel those red lines from the sheets. I still need that shower, but I'm too afraid to go into the bathroom alone. In horror movies, nothing good ever happens in bathrooms. And I want to hear Edward's return. I don't want to walk out of the shower in a towel and have him sitting on my bed twiddling his thumbs like nothing happened.

I forcefully palm my eyes and slap my cheeks in an effort to stem the flow of tears. Time to find somewhere else to wait, somewhere that Edward won't necessarily know that I am. At this point, I'm fine with him coming back to an empty hotel room. It would serve him right.

Time to kill two birds with one stone.

When I had peeked out my little red door earlier, I saw a mesmerizing blue glow between the pillars ahead. At the time, my eyes skittered over the glow because I didn't want to focus on the eerie ambiance it added to an already eerie situation. Now I am thinking more clearly, so I understand what the glow is and what it can do for me.

This time when I open my door, I follow the glow until I'm standing and staring at the nicest pool I've ever seen. This might not be saying much because Forks doesn't have any pools. People are so tired of being constantly wet that they don't often voluntarily immerse themselves in yet more water. Water is something that is forced on you day in and day out. You don't go seeking it out unnecessarily.

Right now I feel like seeking it out. The overwhelming Nebraskan heat and humidity—even this late at night—is not something I'm used to. My year in Phoenix with my mom was like this—the crushing heat, the lethargic silence, the scorching concrete nearly burning a hole through my sneakers the many times I walked the five miles home from school because mom forgot to pick me up.

But I don't really like thinking about Phoenix, so I think about how pretty this pool is instead. The water is a fake yet compelling dark blue, courtesy of the tile lining the pool's depths. Underwater spotlights crisscross in tantalizing patterns designed to make you yearn for a bit of night swimming. At least, that's what I assume from what I'm feeling.

Yes, a good midnight swim will do instead of that shower.

The gate to the pool has a daunting-looking padlock on it, so I contemplate how easy it would be to hop the wooden fence. For me, not easy at all, but that's never stopped me from trying.

I bounce on the balls of my Converse once and then fling myself at the fence.

The air is liquid heat, so I feel like I'm moving in slow-motion. Had I actually been moving in slow-motion, I would have been a sight to behold. My hands grab the top of the fence, and I do my best impression of one of Angela's cool ninja moves. I've watched her for years. How hard can it be?

Um.

Apparently, very hard if you lack Angela's ninja reflexes, muscles, and any semblance of coordination.

Instead of the cool side-vault 180 roll that I'd planned, I lift myself up only enough that my stomach catches the fence, and I pivot like a knife on a straight edge until gravity decides which way it wants to drop me. My head eventually overbalances my lower half, and I scrabble at the fence to try and stop myself on the way down.

Long story short, I end up on my back on the grass on the other side of the fence. Lo and behold, the grass _is_ greener on the other side. But that could be because I'm seeing it up close. And because I'm capable of seeing at all. I use my standard routine to check myself for injury and don't find anything out of the ordinary, aside from some tenderness. Tenderness I can handle.

I lay still for a second and gawk at the massive, immobile firework of stars in the onyx sky. There's something to be said of empty states in the middle of nowhere—they make an excellent place from which to admire the pixie dust of the heavens. And they provide such a perfect opportunity to feel small and insignificant. I wish one of the pinpricks of light would suddenly ignite and streak across my vision. I could use a few wishes right now.

To my right, the pool door swings open, creaking faintly.

I stare at a familiar pair of shoes and ponder the significance of their arrival. I also ponder the significance of the fact that they've just walked through a gate.

A gate that was clearly unlocked.

I could go with a lot of things right now, but I go with an old standby.

"Don't worry," I say to the shiny shoes. "I'm fine."

"No," Edward says, "you're not." For some reason, his low voice sends a tingle of fear up my spine. I've heard this particular tone of voice before. Sure enough, when I look up at him, Edward's teeth are clenched, and his face is contorted in pain.

Um, crap?

Now that he mentions it, something in my left arm is jabbing me insistently. It started a minor protest that has gradually escalated into an all-out riot.

I roll my head on its axis to see that I must have snagged my arm on a wood splinter in the fence. A small yet deep cut is leaking a steady stream of blood from the inside of my left elbow.

Double crap.

This is not good on several fronts, the most important one being that I can already see the edges of my vision preparing to draw the curtain on this particular scene.

I'm going to pass out, and I've started to hyperventilate. Before I completely lose consciousness, I focus on Edward's face, which has appeared above me, upside down.

His freaky eyes are the blackest I've seen. He's like a king cobra towering over me, and I almost can't even pass out due to the hypnosis of his stare.

I think: This does not look like the superhero of the story.

He reaches out a single hand, and his fingers are trembling. For a second, I think he's reaching for my throat. But then he fists the collar of my shirt roughly. I nearly cry out at the hardness of his knuckles as they scrape against my collar bone.

Something in Edward's face prevents me from making a sound. He looks far too predatory right now for me to broadcast my weakness.

The world is beginning to go black, and this time, I worry. There are nowhere near enough people around to catch me. But I'm too far gone. For a second, I feel like I'm flying. My body has left the green grass, and I'm soaring for the stars.

* * *

I wake up when my body falls through ice. I impact and break through the surface of an icy pond. My breath escapes in a trail of bubbles that dance around my face. The chill seeps in and starts moving my sluggish blood. As its fuel starts churning in my valves again, my brain starts firing on all cylinders.

The nearest icy pond is the pool, so that has to be where I now find myself.

Edward has thrown me into the pool.

Should it bother me that I can't swim? The shocking lack of pools in Forks has not really encouraged me to learn. As I struggle to orient myself in the water, I decide that yes, it should probably bother me that I can't swim.

Then I notice how amazingly comfortable and weightless it is down here in this alien world of blue-green. Tell me again why I haven't been dropped into a pool more often? I could get used to sitting cross-legged at the bottom of pools. Every move I make is effortless and graceful and wow, I could live down here forever. I bet I could do Angela's cool ninja move over the fence now. If, of course, the fence were down here with me.

If only I'd been underwater when I fell over the fence, Edward wouldn't have had to kill me.

My lungs are burning, but I don't care because I'm still stuck on how amazingly great it feels to be in this water right now. I might just be a smidge loopy from the passing out thing. Possibly compounded by the current lack of oxygen to my brain.

Only Bella Swan could drown in five feet of water.

Just then, a dark shape slices through the water in front of me. The person grabs me under my armpits and hauls me upward. I'm thinking: Why kill me only to save me? Seems like a waste of effort on Edward's part.

We breach the surface of the water together. The air rushes into my lungs, my throat is on fire, and that weird barking noise is me coughing up water.

Through bleary eyes stinging with chlorine, I see Edward's fierce eyes staring into mine. His head is popping out of the water like a gopher, and his hair is tornadoing to the side.

"Are you okay?" he asks quietly. I notice that he's still grinding his teeth. His shoulders strain from the water like the tip of a muscular iceberg.

_Cough_, is all I do in response. I look down and see that the pool lights are doing nothing to hide the view. In my eye line, I see a nearly endless expanse of misty white torso.

When did Edward take off his shirt? I look over to see a white heap next to neat, shiny shoes. His toes are bare again. I wiggle my own toes to find them still firmly—albeit a bit uncomfortably—encased in my trusty Converse. So much for never washing my shoes.

Edward is regarding me with worry/anger, his eyes flitting across my face.

"Did I mention I'm fine?" I sputter. Forget the shirt. I may have to get a tattoo of those words—on my forehead.

But as usual, I'm not quite fine. Everything about this situation confuses me. I'm torn in so many directions by my heart, my mind, his face, his hands that I may rip apart. My dominant emotion is fear. Fear of abandonment, fear of predatory animals, and a newfound fear of water. Along with fear, however, is hope (Edward came back) and anticipation (of what Edward will do now).

Edward is a contradiction. His constant, blatant rejection of my presence, my physical touch, and yet he's always back for more by the next episode of this little drama we're playing out. He kidnaps me on this odyssey and pleads for me to talk to him for hours. When I finally open up, he bolts. His face is beautiful yet terrible, simultaneously drawing me in yet pushing me away with its ferocity.

His face epitomizes menace: bruised eyes like purple clouds low on the horizon, dark brows a bottomless fissure in the earth, lip curled, sharp teeth flashing like a dog's warning, wet hair tornadoing to the side, the black in his eyes spreading like a violently spilled inkwell.

Everything about him right now screams danger, predator, stalk you, run.

But he's touching my face, and instead of lightning in his fingertips, he traces my skin as carefully as if he were painting an intricate portrait on silk.

And I'm tired of running.

Maybe if I stay in the vortex of his storm, I'll be safe.

In the split second between lightning and thunder, I make my decision. I surge forward, creating a mini tidal wave in the pool, and wrap my arms around his milky torso.

"Isabella…" he warns, closing his eyes as though my nearness pains him. His nostrils flex as if testing the breeze. I can only smell the stinging chlorine, but his lips curl as though someone nearby has baked fresh cinnamon cookies.

I respond by tightening my arms, bracing for the storm's fury. His eyes snap open, and I get it.

Edward doesn't ask for my lips this time, he takes them.

He descends on my mouth, and he's nipping, sucking, pulling in need. He's pushing me against the side of the pool, and my shoulder blades slip against the cool tile. His hand urges my knee to wrap more tightly around his waist. I'm welding myself to a granite column.

I've been kissed before, but I've never been kissed like this—even most recently in a closet. Now I know that night in the closet was nothing. That Edward was holding back.

_Mine_, his lips tell me, and my body shivers in response as he clutches at my arms, the curve of my waist, the back of my knees. His hands seem to be everywhere at once, and it's all I can do to hold on.

I know he's fast and strong, but I sense something else entirely. Every plunging kiss, every rough caress, and a thin veneer of his normally polite façade is stripped away.

He doesn't even taste like before. When I run my tongue along his bottom lip, I taste rust and salt. Almost as though he had been crying.

When my tongue recedes, he growls, and it's the most erotic thing I've ever heard. This isn't the sound of someone running; it's the sound of chasing, of being caught, of never letting go.

On either side of my head, his hands grasp at the tile, and I hear the clink of fracturing ceramic.

For the first time, I can almost believe that he does want me. He has so much strength in the hard lines of his body, and yet his lips are melted chocolate against mine.

In response, all I can do is whimper.

At my small sound, Edward stills, becomes immobile, the eye of the storm.

"Good," he says, exhaling harshly through his nose. "You _should_ be afraid."

He pulls back, and I see that his eyes are fractured, as though the beast they caged had almost broken free. I can only stare at him as his eyes clear, as he realizes that he's left a trail of destruction in the tile at his fingertips. He turns his face away, his neck straining.

I raise a hand to his neck to coax his eyes back to mine. I want him to know that I didn't whimper out of fear, but out of pleasure. I want to tell him that there's nothing he could possibly say that would make me turn away from what he is. My heart is beating so strongly I can feel my pulse through the palm against his neck. I focus on his cool skin, wanting to feel the counterpoint of his heart against mine.

For a moment, the harsh push and pull of our breathing fills the air. As my hand lingers, Edward's head swivels, his eyes boring into mine with an urgency I don't understand. Like he's willing me to understand something. I can feel the tendons in his neck tense against my hand.

But I don't feel the tell-tale pulse of his heart. For a second, I think this is because our hearts are beating as one. Only for a second, until I find out how horribly wrong I am. As I start to process this anomaly, I stop moving and breathing so that I can listen more intently.

This is what I hear: I hear my own heart, beating rapidly and erratically, fairly shooting blood through my veins. This is what I _don't_ hear: From Edward, I hear nothing. I grow very still. His body is cold and unyielding as stone.

He's watching my eyes, and he knows that I know.

Like the Tin Man, he doesn't have a heart.

He doesn't resist as I pull one of his arms toward me, palm up. I place two fingers on his cold wrist for a moment. Nothing.

I put my palm on his other wrist. Nothing.

He's gone limp and unresisting in the water, and his eyes are tarnished copper. I look right into them and then lower my head to plant my ear firmly against his left breast.

Nothing.

If I were about an inch high and capable of screaming into his chest cavity, I would probably hear an echo of my scream. An echo of horror instead of love.

My list of things about Edward Cullen has just exploded in a scattering of little black letters. Superheroes can't die. They aren't dead. They're alive. They help others live.

Am I awake?

Did my earlier fixation on horror movies creep into my dreams?

Is this a zombie come to murder me in my sleep?

But no, Edward's jaw is too sharp, his eyes too bright, his skin too cold. I can't be dreaming. I don't dream in Technicolor clarity.

Instinct tells me to be afraid. Should I demand to know what his problem is? What he's done to himself to make his heart stop beating? Maybe he's a super athlete whose heart beats only a handful of times a minute. Yes, that would fit with the superhero I know him to be. Superheroes are athletes times a thousand.

As if reading my thoughts, Edward says, "You know some of my secrets, but you don't know all of them."

I shiver with the force of the statement. I want to know all of them, but I'm afraid. I can't understand the secret he's keeping that is preventing his heart from beating.

"You're cold," he whispers, his eyes on my lips. "Wait here."

Part of me wants to protest, to wrap myself around him like the water in this pool so this moment will never end. But the other part of me understands. Like cars, pools are shoddy places for resolution.

And this _will_ be resolved. Nothing he could say could change the way I feel, could it?

I watch as he dives up into the air using his arms as leverage. I watch as water cascades down the taut skin of his back. I watch as his spine disappears into his jeans.

Then he's crouching above me, looking down at me again. I can see that he's hesitating. His eyes flick down to my left arm currently truncated by the water. Something about his face and the hunch of his shoulders tell me the barrier of the water is somehow Very Important.

"One second," he says, standing in a swift movement. When I blink, he's gone. I hear a nearby car door and hotel door slam in rapid succession.

Then he's standing in front of me again. He puts his hands under my armpits and pulls me from the pool directly to my feet. He keeps his eyes carefully on my face as he lifts, although I notice that his lip curls a bit before he sets me down at the edge of the pool. And I doubt his lip is curling because he finds me heavy.

As soon as my feet are squishing on the concrete, Edward drapes something soft across my left arm and pads a few paces back.

"Put that on," he instructs and turns his face away.

I hastily throw on the white terry cloth robe he has retrieved for me. I don't know—maybe he has something against the fully clothed, drenched kitten fashion statement I'm making.

"Let's get to our room," he adds. I thrill and chill at his casual use of the word "our."

I nod and stumble forward. Edward supports me with an arm around my waist, an arm that I don't even realize I need. The bones in my legs are apparently on hiatus after the wonderful weightless water and the force of our make-out session.

Edward partially carries me upstairs with ease and finagles the hotel room door open with one hand and shoulder. He positions me gently on the bed and sits beside me while he ferrets in a first aid kit.

To fill the silence, I say, "I never pictured you driving around with a first aid kit in the Volvo."

Even from the side, I see that he's scowling.

"Alice suggested it as a precaution," he says as he hands me a boring, Caucasian-flesh colored band aid. Where's SpongeBob when you need him?

"Ah," I say intelligently as understanding slowly filters through my muddled head. "She knew I'd need it."

He nods curtly but looks away.

"Why didn't she just tell you what was going to happen?" Really, she could have passed me a cryptic note along the lines of "The gate is unlocked." Very existentialist of her, but it would have done the trick. She could have saved me a lot of headache—literally.

From the grimace on Edward's face, I can tell he's thinking the same thing. Or perhaps he's merely frustrated by the speed at which I'm _not_ unwrapping the band aid.

"I don't know." From the set of his face, I'm sure that he'll eventually find out.

"So Alice saw that this would turn out okay?"

Edward's scowl deepens. "No. She gambled with your safety. The cliché about the future changing at the flap of a butterfly's wings is not far off."

Somehow, I think Alice knows her brother better than he thinks.

"You wouldn't hurt me," I say stubbornly.

He looks at the floor. "You don't know that. You don't know me."

But I want to know him.

And he's going to let me. As soon as I can get this stupid cut bandaged. This time, I'm not preparing to rip off a band-aid—I'm putting one on. Treating a wound, starting the healing process, trying to make myself whole.

Edward is looking increasingly edgy the longer my fingers fumble with the small strip of plastic. His eyes dart frequently to the pinprick of blood dotting the arm of my robe, but he uncharacteristically doesn't offer to help.

When I give my arm a final pat to secure the adhesive, he relaxes. He slumps on the bed, the anger in his face sliding to sadness, like he's just buried the family pet.

I say, "What are you going to tell me?"

He looks down, and this is one of those times when you know you need to get ready. It's coming. I don't know what, but I can feel it. I'm like an old man with an old injury that twinges before a storm.

"I'm going to tell you," he says, "about guilt."

Guilt? What does guilt have to do with what he is? And he takes a deep breath, and I'm about to find out.

"I wanted to hate you from the first moment I met you."

An eerie repetition of my own words. If we both wanted to hate each other so badly, why didn't we? None of this makes any sense.

But it's my turn to listen, so I do.

"I tried hard to hate you, to tell myself that you were unimportant, that I could stay away from you. I latched on to the one person I thought would help push you away. Rosalie doesn't like you very much; you're everything she's not. I thought the feeling might be mutual.

"She was the perfect cover. Your arch nemesis with an unusually considerate boyfriend intent on making it work with her, no matter what. And a personality that would never question my motives in constantly seeking her out but then being distracted by you the entire time she and I were together."

I'm shaking my head and saying, "You weren't distracted by me."

He says, "You think that because I'm a good liar. I've always been good. Too good."

He says, "I wanted you to think that I didn't notice you. I wanted you to think that this was all about Rosalie."

He says, "You say you're obsessed with me? I'm just as obsessed with you, Bella, if not more."

Not possible. This is not possible.

My head, it's shaking harder now.

"It's true," he says. "You thought I was avoiding you. You thought I didn't notice you. I knew when I was within a one-mile radius of you. Every second we spent together…"

"What are you talking about." It's not really a question, just me trying to reject him with my words.

"We became friends. That was my first mistake. We bantered, and I realized for the first time how different you are than your average high schooler. Maybe that's why I can't read you—you're something more…" He's dropping his eyes and breathing and his face is agonizingly tight. So much is going on inside that pretty little head of his, so much that I don't know.

"I wanted you so badly, but I knew that I had to stay away."

I keep shaking my head because I don't understand what I'm supposed to be understanding here. None of this makes any sense. He wanted me but he stayed away?

This could have all gone so differently.

I say, "Why didn't you want me to know?"

He is quiet for a moment.

"What I am, it will repulse you. You won't want to be with me anymore."

I've seen him, and nothing about him has repulsed me so far.

"Edward," I say, and his eyes light up. Is it wrong of me to know that this is the first time I've said his name? If so, we're both wrong in knowing; I can see he knows it, too.

"I know what you are," I say.

"And what is that?" His voice is the merest of whispers.

"A wolf superhero masquerading in sheep's designer clothing."

He stares at me with an unreadable expression. "Perceptive," is all he says.

"Were you by chance bitten by a radioactive spider?"

He laughs a dark laugh. "The answer to two-thirds of that question is 'no.' But I _was_ bitten."

I grow still because we're almost there.

"But not by a radioactive spider," he says.

But you _were_ bitten.

"And I'm not the superhero." His voice is softer.

Please don't let me be wrong on this.

He whispers, "I'm the bad guy."

I'm thinking: This doesn't make sense. Then I remember Alice's words in a clearing. Apparently, so does he.

"Killing is my _modus operandi_. I've killed more people than I can count."

I can envision all sorts of socially acceptable scenarios in which Edward could hypothetically kill people, scenarios that range from being addicted to online video games all the way to head-on collisions with oncoming traffic because you drive like a maniac.

"Like _killed_ killed?"

"Murdered."

"On purpose?"

"Planned in cold blood."

Forget the sound of a pin dropping; this is the type of statement that is accompanied by the sound of a grand piano plummeting four stories to a cacophonous death.

So he's _killed_ killed people. But he didn't kill the one that I can count.

"You didn't kill James."

You threw him and battered him, but you didn't kill him. I was there.

"No." Softer than a whisper now, and his lips struggle as though he doesn't want to say what's next. "But I want to kill you."

The six words hang in the air between us for a moment. They sound like a line in a cheesy road trip horror flick. Despite myself, I grow cold. Goose bumps rise on my flesh. I _knew_ that we couldn't last five days in a car. I _knew _that this hotel room would be the death of me.

I've read stories about psychopaths who are the nicest, most pleasant people—until they get you alone in a hotel room. But I keep coming back to the fact that Edward has had ample opportunities to kill me. Why save me again and again only to kill me later?

None of this makes any sense. Edward keeps saying one thing and doing another. I don't know what to believe.

He tells me he wants to kiss me but then runs from the room when he tries.

He saves my life and then tells me he wants to kill me.

He acts like a superhero but then tells me he's the bad guy.

I say, "You stopped the van. You saved my life."

He grimaces, then speaks quickly. "Only so that your blood would not be spilled right in front of me. I couldn't have controlled myself."

I'm thinking: Blood. There's something about Edward and blood. How ironic it is that he's got a positive fascination with it and I have a negative one.

"You threw me into a pool to wash away my blood." More slowly this time, as I've just figured it out.

Edward merely turns his head away.

"You left our hotel room rather than tempt yourself with the smell of my blood…?"

I like this reason better than the alternative. I don't think I could hear him say that he was so disgusted with my confession after days of silence and himself for staging this little kidnapping that he was halfway out of Nebraska before having a change of heart.

He doesn't disappoint.

"Yes."

"So you're incredibly strong and fast and you like blood?" I tick off these qualities on my fingers. "What, are you a vampire or something?"

Edward blinks.

"Um," he says.

I go: Crap.

Crappity crap crap.

My weird, random guesses are never true. That's what they're for. That's why I use them. They help soften the truth. But the strategy failed me this time.

"I don't believe you," I say.

But part of me does.

You know when you have one of those moments where you're looking at something and, all of a sudden, things shift in your mind?

Like you're looking at a line drawing of a cube, and it's suddenly oriented a different way? Or the rabbit that's also a duck? The old hag looking down who's also a beautiful lady looking away?

This is one of those moments.

I'm looking into Edward Cullen's eyes, and all of a sudden everything starts to shift. There's a fancy psychobabble term for this. It's called a Gestalt shift.

After a Gestalt shift, you can never see the thing you're looking at the same as you did before. After the shift, you've gained new knowledge. You're wise. You know that you can focus your eyes just _so_ and you'll see something else. You know of the thing's duality now, and you won't be fooled again.

You can never go back to your original state of innocence. It's happening to me now as I stare into Edward Cullen's freaky yellow eyes. My innocence is being stripped away.

You've heard my theories about those eyes. They give him the following:  
(1) Speed  
(2) Strength  
(3) Beauty  
(4) Dexterity  
(5) Mind-reading

Which, in turn, allow him to do the following:  
(1) Run across parking lots in a blink  
(2) Stop vans  
(3) Be irresistible to the ladies  
(4) Kill on the piano  
(5) Save head cheerleaders from psychotic ex-boyfriends

But look again.

Listen, as he tells you his life story.

As you listen to his story, you look at his freaky yellow eyes, and you see something new. Now, behind those eyes you see a man trapped in a 17-year-old body. A man with a thirst that claws constantly at his throat, begging for release in the only way possible.

He doesn't sleep, he doesn't dream, he can't reset, he can't refresh. He's frozen forever as the sick, sad little boy who watched his parents waste away in front of him.

As Edward talks, I look into his eyes, and I can almost feel my perception of him shift. I am no longer innocent.

Now I understand the unexpected menace I occasionally sense in his voice and tone. Why boys in the cafeteria lunch line don't tackle him for cutting and stealing all the pizza. Why I hastily exited a closet in the Newton's basement.

Why I knew that I was braving a storm in a pool.

I keep looking, and my two perceptions of Edward war in my brain.

Shift.

The golden-eyed superhero who saves girls from fiendish vans with one hand.

Shift back.

The yellow-eyed, pasty white freak who saves girls from vans so he can savor their death in remote hotel rooms later.

Shift, and I'm seeing the events from the past few weeks with new eyes.

Edward watches me uneasily. He's wishing that one wire in the circuit of my brain weren't fried so that he could get reception.

"You can't possibly be a vampire," I say. "Vampires have fangs and ruby eyes and are devastated by mirrors, garlic, sunlight, and stakes through the heart.

"They also do not show up in pictures," I say, as though this clinches the matter.

"Myth," he says, "carefully cultivated to keep humans from recognizing what we really are and comfortable in the false hope that they are safe."

He pauses.

"Keep talking," I say.

"What else is there?" He sounds desperate, floundering. He's baring his soul, his walls are coming tumbling down, and I'm sitting here, numb and quiet. Of course, he doesn't know what's going on in my head.

"What do you eat?"

He smiles slightly as though it's the most basic question I could have asked.

"Animals."

"Me too," I snark, out of habit. "Can you be more specific?"

"Mountain lion when I can but deer, elk, and bears when I can't."

In my head, I see Edward crouched in front of a mountain lion, and it's perfect. Facing each other, they're similarly sleek and powerful with matching gleaming eyes and sharp teeth.

"What did you eat tonight?"

His smile widens as he realizes that I get it. Or maybe he's smiling because I haven't run off screaming. Or because I'm not acting repulsed as I'm sitting here conversing intelligently about his big, bad secret.

"Several antelope. It took me longer than expected to find them. I apologize for leaving you alone for so long."

"I forgive you." More than you know. This is probably the best reason ever for being left alone in a strange hotel room in the middle of nowhere. The boy you're with had to spend extra time tracking down native wildlife in an effort to save you from himself. It might not get any more romantic than this.

"That's actually why my eyes are weird."

Now I'm really staring. Edward just said that his eyes are weird. If he'd called them freaky, I probably would have died laughing at the amazing coincidence. "Define weird."

Inside, another shift is starting. Just when I think I can reconcile golden eyes with freaky yellow eyes, Edward tells me about ruby eyes.

I thought he'd already told me about guilt, the bloodlust he feels when he's around me, but now I find out how wrong I am. The guilt he feels when tempted to kill me is nothing compared to the guilt he feels about those he's killed.

He tells me about the years he spent as a vigilante in over-populated cities. How he used his extra-sensory ability to identify his victims. How he saved other, would-be victims by slaughtering those who wished them harm. How he would have slaughtered James had it not been for my image in a mirror.

Okay, so things _can_ get more romantic.

Edward just told me that the image of my face in a mirror helped tame the beast within. That my face didn't hold a hint of fear as I watched him roughing up James. That he wants to be the type of person I can look at without fear.

Everything has shifted again as I stare into Edward's eyes.

This whole time I've seen Edward as the perfect little superhero. Perfect face, perfect voice, perfect family, perfect life. I understood he was wearing a mask, but I didn't understand how extensive that mask was. How deep the secret he was trying to hide.

I've been seeing him as a superhero; someone who saves people's lives. But he sees himself as a monster, someone who takes lives. Everyone loves him, but he despises himself.

I thought he was perfect, but he's more messed up than I am. Perfectly put together on the surface, but a tangled mess of emotions underneath.

His beautiful, glowing eyes are so alive, but they've seen so much death. Have caused so much death. His eyes are guilty. But they are not ruby. This is important.

I'm thinking about a story my grandma once told me about guardian angels. This is also important.

He says, "Now you know. Now you know why I stayed away from you. Why I hate myself. Why we can never be together."


	8. Chapter 8: The V word

**Author's note:** This chapter is dedicated to bananapancakes7, author of The Woods are Lovely, Dark, and Deep. Without her, this story would probably have remained unread, unloved, and un-done.

Thanks, lady! :)

* * *

**------------| Type O Negative, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

I open my eyes to find a vampire watching me from the low couch.

Note my casual use of the v-word—very Harry Potter of me. As my brain gives me a quick "Last night, in Bella's life…" update, I realize that—all logic and sanity to the contrary—last night wasn't a dream after all. That Edward had, indeed, bared his soul about the fact that he has no soul.

And I realize that the soul-less vampire is smirking at me.

"What?"

"Nothing," he says in a tone that implies the exact opposite. "How did you sleep?"

I struggle free of the blanket and sit up.

"Fine, thank you."

Look at us being overly polite. I hear couples tend to do that the morning after.

Although the smirk is practically begging me to comment, my eyes are nearly crusted shut, my hair has graduated to an Amy Winehouse beehive, and I _still_ need that shower. When it occurs to me that vampires probably have a wonderfully keen sense of smell, I bolt for the bathroom.

As I start the water, I notice a bouquet of toiletries arranged in an OCD grid across the countertop, all with friendly blue Walmart tags. Apparently, Edward forgot to mention the part about him making a Walmart pit-stop during his absence last night.

Like with my snack items earlier, Edward has over-achieved. While lathering myself with three different kinds of body wash—all in varying flavors of strawberry, oddly enough—I avoid thinking about the fact that Edward and I had declared ourselves last night.

I do not think about the fact that, in the space of a few minutes that simultaneously qualify as the best and worst of my life, I'd found out that the boy I want to be with also wants to be with me—but can't.

Or the fact that the boy is not a boy at all.

Instead, I think about the fact that I can't imagine Edward in a Walmart.

I especially can't imagine him in the lingerie section of Walmart trying to pick me out a six pack of colorful bikini underwear. I'm not even going to ask how he figured out my size. I can just see him standing in the middle of Walmart with his fingers outstretched in an approximation of my waist, a saleslady hovering nearby.

I can just hear him telling the saleslady, "When I was in the process of lifting her out of a pool that I'd just chucked her in to prevent me from drinking her blood, I noticed that her waist was about _yea_ big."

Knowing the Edward Effect like I do, I'm sure the sales lady was very helpful.

When I step out of the bathroom, freshly scrubbed and smelling distinctly like a u-pick strawberry farm, I see that Edward has made my bed so perfectly that I can't even tell that I slept in it, much less wallowed in a sea of my own tears.

I'm standing there, my damp hair well on its way to creating unsightly wet spots on my new Walmart t-shirt, and I realize that I don't have a clue what to say next.

What do you talk about the morning after you find out the guy you're crushing on is a vampire?

"I was hoping we could talk about last night," Edward says.

In Forks, this is the point at which I would have probably been edging for the nearest exit. The walls of the hotel room are pushing inward, his gaze is pleading me outward.

But I've learned. I've changed. I'm not going to retreat into my Bella ball or make a grand exit.

I owe him that.

"Last night," I say slowly, "didn't change anything."

He frowns. "It should have changed everything."

It didn't change the most important thing.

"It didn't change the way I feel."

_Feel_. Present tense, and his face…

His face is a beautiful, startling contradiction of light and dark, ecstasy and despair, Jacksonville and Forks. Ecstasy, because people who think they're monsters are always thrilled when someone tells them they're not. Despair, because this monster wants desperately to save me from himself.

Jacksonville, because he knows I should go. Forks, because he wants me to stay.

I make the decision for him, striding forward and opening the little red door.

"Let's get this show on the road. Renee is expecting us tonight."

Really, it's not a decision at all. There's something in Jacksonville that I need.

* * *

We're back on the road, and I'm flipping idly through Edward's iPod trying to decide on the perfect soundtrack for the final phase of our journey. I'm trying to decide if I'm more in the mood for Britney Spears or a funeral dirge. I'll bet Edward has Britney on here because he thinks _he's_ toxic.

I'm also trying to decide the best way to approach the number one item on my newly created list of things I need to know about Edward Cullen.

What is the first thing that you do when you find out that someone likes you?

You find out _why_.

In this case especially, I need to know details. Plenteous details. Details that will explain the inexplicable—the hero falling for the sidekick.

But where to start?

When in doubt, put the ball in the other person's court.

"Was there something you wanted to tell me earlier?"

Earlier as in when I had just woken up.

He cocks his head. "Apart from the fact that I'm a blood-sucking monster?"

Britney it is.

"Obviously, apart from that."

Edward says, "Let's just say our conversation didn't end after you fell asleep."

Glance over, and I see that little smirk playing peek-a-boo behind his eyes.

"Um. What did I say?"

And the smirk floods back onto his face.

"You may have mentioned something about pinky toes."

This is what I think: Kill me. Now.

This is what I do: I am the picture of nonchalance, and I wave a dismissive hand.

"Oh, I meant Pinky and the Brain. I was having some random dream about taking over the world."

He cocks a disbelieving eyebrow at me, and I fairly trip over myself to change the subject.

"Personally, I'd like to hear the play-by-play of your kiss with Rosalie."

"I thought we were talking about how fascinating you are when you sleep."

Fascinating? Watching someone sleep is like watching paint dry.

"Actually, we were talking about how fickle you are."

"Fickle?" he echoes in disbelief.

"Inconstant. Capricious. Vacillating."

"Vampires are not fickle."

"Rosalie might disagree."

He sighs a deep, soul-cleansing sigh. "I thought we'd already discussed this. She really truly did kiss me. For like two seconds." This is his least favorite subject. Which is why I continue to bring it up. "Any particular reason that you're coming back to that? Does this relate to why you've inflicted this hideous racket on my ear drums?"

"I'm not the one who has every single Britney Spears album on my iPod."

He eyes the device for a second.

"Ah. Jasper must have 'prepped' it for this trip when Alice saw you'd be looking at it. They're probably rolling around on the floor as we speak. But you didn't answer my first question."

"Fine. I'm coming back to that because I spent several months of my life under the distinct impression that you liked another girl. Everything you did served to perpetuate that impression."

The comment hung in the air for a moment. Then…

"Everything I did was for you."

Now this I gotta hear.

"Prove it."

"Fine. Number one, I switched lab tables to protect you and the rest of your classmates from getting slaughtered like a herd of cattle."

I scoff, "You don't know if—"

"I do," he says immediately, and his golden eyes are intense. "Alice saw it. I had made the choice."

"A choice that you clearly un-made."

"Yes. But I thought of 438 ways to take your life during and after that class. Alice counted. She got quite the horror peep show."

Oh look. Even Edward's imagination is over-achieving. "But you didn't go through with it."

"No," he says. He explains that I touched him. I tried to empathize with him. He couldn't read me at all, so he couldn't automatically discount me as yet another frivolous teenager, a.k.a. vampire fodder.

He says, "Number two, I let you drive me around in your car even though it's so slow and smells so much like you that I'm in an excruciating combination of mental and physical agony when I'm in it."

"You deserved it."

"How so?"

"Two words: Bumblebee costume."

He smiles. "Which brings me to number three: I made you the life of the party in your bumblebee costume."

"After inflicting the costume on me in the first place."

"Do you mind? You're throwing off my rhythm here. Number four, I threw you into a pool so that the chlorine could mask your scent."

I look up from where I've been counting his points on my fingers.

"So how does the part about you kissing Rosalie fit in?"

"For the love of all that is unholy, she kissed me! I betrayed too much by coming so unerringly to her rescue. Would you have had me startle like a jack rabbit rather than let her be scared and thankful?"

"Yes," I say. But really, I would rather he have:

(1) Slipped deftly out from under the kiss  
(2) Left her sucking air like a fish out of water  
(3) Come give me kudos for my genius input that allowed him to make the rescue in the first place

He says, "For your information, I peeled Rosalie's arms from around my neck as quickly as I could without snapping her wrists at about the time you walked off in a huff."

"For your information, I was righteously indignant, not huffing."

"Ah, my mistake."

"I suppose you're now going to tell me that you saved Rosalie's life for my benefit as well."

Let's see him get out of that one.

He sighs. "I wouldn't be the kind of man you want if I had ignored the James situation like I desperately wanted to."

He got out of that one.

He got out of that one so good I can feel my flesh tingling. Is it wrong of my flesh to tingle when he refers to himself as a man I want?

His voice softens. "Bad things happen. Every day. My sister and I can't prevent them all." This is the classic superhero quandary. I stare at him because I've never seen it played out in real life. "Sometimes the _what ifs_ drive me mad. What if I'd done _this_? Or _that_? But Alice can see that none of those things help in the long run. Most of the scenarios end with me and/or my family getting exposed for what we are, all hope for a normal life lost."

This is why most superheroes don't have families.

"In James' case, though, Alice knew we _could _do something about it. That your influence with your dad would be the key."

So he thinks it's acceptable for the superhero to fall for the sidekick when the sidekick continuously comes up with amazing solutions to his problems? He's made me sound like a calculator.

Here's what I think: Perhaps our superhero has fallen for his sidekick because we have diametrically opposing powers. He's nearly invulnerable. I'm overly vulnerable. Maybe I'm his complete opposite, and we attract like cosmic magnets.

Perhaps this is an acceptable twist when the intended, Plan A heroine is absurdly dull and vain. Plan B: Let's see if the smocks and goggles sidekick is still available.

I tell Edward my theory, and he mimes banging his head against the steering wheel.

"You're not Plan B. You're not the short end of the stick. You're not second best." He looks like he wants to beat this into my head rather than the steering wheel. But I'm sure he's too much of a gentleman to follow through. "There is no Plan B. You were Plan A all along."

"Okay," I say.

"Okay what?" He's looking at me suspiciously, as I'm sure my face isn't inspiring confidence.

"We agree to disagree on whether or not I'm Plan B."

He rolls his eyes at me, but I think he can sense I've backed down. Because I have. A little.

We sit in silence for a moment. And as I'm sitting here, minding my own business, I hear the most unlikely of sounds.

A _snicker_.

The vampire just _snickered_.

"You do know that I never actually expected you to wear the bumblebee costume, right?"

* * *

We hit Atlanta at rush hour, and Edward joins the ranks of slow-moving commuters with a sigh.

"You should put your seat belt on," he says as he downshifts rapidly.

I look over at him and notice the blatant hypocrisy. "You should put _your_ seat belt on."

"I'm the invulnerable vampire here, remember?"

"That won't help if a cop pulls us over."

"I'm also the built-in radar detector."

Grumbling something about Edward being old enough to be my great-grandpa, I pull the strap across my body and click it closed.

Less than a second later, Edward has to slam on his brakes as a little old lady in a boat of a car pulls leisurely into his lane, her car angling so slowly that it might as well be the Titanic.

I surge forward, and the seat belt bites into my flesh. I let out a decidedly unladylike grunt.

"Sorry," Edward says, his voice tight. "This is why I don't usually—" He cuts off.

I'm gingerly lifting the seatbelt from my neck when I notice that Edward is staring at me. Or, more specifically, at my neck. If it were possible, his face is a whiter shade of pale.

"What?"

I follow his gaze. I see the first flowering of a bruise above my collar.

I know instantly that this is not a good thing.

I know instantly that I'm about to find how quickly banter can go to bust.

Edward pulls his eyes away and stares straight ahead. He's glaring at the little tuft of curly white hair that is just visible above the little old lady's seat, but I know that he's not seeing it. He's seeing each individual blood vessel in a mangled spider web under my skin.

"I did that," he says. It wasn't a question.

"_That_ is nothing."

"It looked like something to me."

"Dude. I'm a walking peach. I bruise if you look at me cross-eyed."

He sends me a look that could slag steel. Or, according to what I had just said, could mash my face into a pulp.

I plead, "It was an accident."

He shakes his head vehemently, his eyes burning coals.

He says, "Accidents are when you bump into someone and cause them to drop their books. Accidents are when you stub your toe on the bath tub. Accidents are _not_ being thrown so roughly into a pool that you have a softball-sized bruise the next day."

"If I've learned anything at all over the past few months, it's that you would never intentionally hurt me."

He hits the steering wheel with one gloved palm, hard.

"My very existence is a danger to you. Just look at everything that has happened since I came into your life."

"Yes, let's. Remember that part about you saving me from the van? I'm _alive_ because of you."

He scowls. "No. I'm the reason you were ever exposed to that van in the first place."

I blink.

"What are you _talking_ about?"

"My presence—I was making you nervous. Your palms were sweaty, you were fumbling with the handle. If I hadn't been there, you would have been safely in your tank of a car, halfway down the road, by the time Tyler's van got anywhere near that ice."

This is me, utterly speechless.

"You…

"I don't…

"That's a bunch of…"

I can't even finish.

Finally I say, "You don't know that."

"I do," he says softly. "Alice saw it."

So Alice doesn't tell me about the gate, but she tells him about the van. I'm starting to see how amazingly unhelpful a psychic can be.

Edward continues, "I said before that everything I've done is for you, and I was right. Everything I _am _is for you."

His eyes are cooling as quickly as a coal out of the fire.

"But I'm a killer. For you, I'm death."

The cars are honking and Edward is down-shifting and that stupid seatbelt keeps digging in deeper and deeper.

"That's why I'm taking you to Jacksonville, Bella. I don't want to hurt you anymore."

Too late.

* * *

We end our little odyssey like we started—in silence. But the silence is different this time. No longer a smothering overcoat, it's more like the white shroud over a corpse. We make small talk and stir the silence with our breath, but it eventually settles back over our eyes, our nose, our mouth.

It's my turn to sit in the car and agonize over the other person's silence.

Edward is doing his best impression of a corpse. Sitting there in all his dark, brooding glory, he's like a supermassive black hole, sucking the life and color out of everything around him.

I keep glancing at him—the jut of his jaw, the firm line of his lips, his fingers clamped on the steering wheel. He doesn't glance back. If I didn't know better—if I didn't know he was a sophisticated, century-old vampire—I would say that he's pouting.

I want to breathe my life into him. I want to tell him that I couldn't care less that he accidentally roughed me up while saving my life. I want to bang my forehead on the dashboard to prove that I, too, can give myself bruises.

But most importantly, I want to remind him that bruises heal. Give me enough time, my body can heal anything. The real question is—can I heal _him_? Can I teach an old vampire new tricks?

Can I show this vampire that he's more man than monster? Convince him that he's more likely to gnaw off his own arm rather than willingly cause me harm?* Prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'm alive because of him and him alone?

I can only try.

Like my mind, the wheels on the Volvo go round and round.

* * *

* For a detailed answer to this question, see the delectable Carpe Noctem and Fiat Lux by Queen of Grey. :)


	9. Chapter 9: Inquisition

**------------| Type O Negative, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

We arrive in Jacksonville at twilight, a limbo between light and dark that perfectly reflects the limbo that Edward and I are in right now. I'm disappointed to have to wait another night to really experience the land of the sun. Then it occurs to me that Edward probably wants it this way. I think back to the time I've spent with him, and I realize that most of it has been indoors or at night. This would explain why he and his siblings were out the two sunny days after Rosalie's ordeal. This would explain the illegally dark tint on his car windows. And his driving gloves.

Somehow I don't think he'd appreciate me telling him right now that he looks hot in leather.

When Edward zooms into the driveway of Renee's little blue house, light streams from its every window, and the front door flies open almost instantly. Renee bounds off the porch and gives me an expansive hug before I'm halfway out of the car.

She's more polite and formal with Edward.

When he turns to get our bags out of the trunk, she raises her eyebrows at me, her blue eyes practically bugging out of her head. I told her I was bringing a friend. I forgot to mention the part about him being male. And more than passably attractive.

As she ushers us toward the house, Renee's got the speculative mom look in her eye. She's sizing Edward up in her head, trying to figure out if he's good enough for her daughter. If she decides he's not good enough for me, Edward will be her biggest fan.

When you bring a significant other home to meet the parent, you have certain hopes and expectations. You hope that the parent in question will think that your significant other is mature. That he or she is intelligent. That he or she is worthy of their child. You expect that your significant other will be charming. And respectful. And appropriate.

Edward Cullen does not disappoint.

He turns on the charm, and Renee melts. He asks her all about her freshly landscaped lawn, the trim on the house, and her handmade rock path leading to the front steps. Renee likes nothing more than talking about her pet projects. Of course, Edward knows this.

Edward Cullen is the perfect significant other. Except, of course, for the fact that he constantly wants to kill me—a little nugget that we'd be wise to hide from Renee.

She shows us upstairs to my room. It has the same white four-poster bed and pictures of horses on the wall that I remember from sixth grade. Almost as though she'd transplanted my Arizona bedroom to Florida, in an effort to pretend that…what? That she still has a little girl?

I notice there's an extra sleeping pallet on the floor for my friend.

When she sees me looking at it, Renee turns to Edward with an overly sweet smile. "Would you help me take this bedding downstairs?"

"Of course," Edward says and holds out his arms while Renee piles on the bedding. All I can see of Edward now is the tuft of his hair.

"I hope you like couches," she says as she leads him down to the living room.

"He loves them," I call out helpfully.

Renee gets Edward settled and stops by to say goodnight, promising a full tour in the morning. After she's gone, the door of my bedroom opens as I'm turning down the covers on my bed. Edward steps in and closes the door soundlessly behind him.

"Thanks for the couch comment. Your mom now wonders if we're sleeping together."

"Would it help if we told her you don't sleep?"

"Probably not."

Edward hovers by the door, and I notice he's shed his charming façade like a snakeskin. Back to the whole brooding standby, I see.

"Speaking of not sleeping, may I offer you this fabulous, retro rocking chair?" Despite myself, I glance hopefully at the small wooden chair that my parents used to rock me to sleep in when I was a baby. "Unless you are really fancying that couch."

"Actually, there's something else I need to do."

"Oh."

Then I get it.

"_Oh. _Need some more 'air'?"

Look at us. We even have our own codeword. It doesn't get more superhero than that.

"Yes. I want you to be safe."

I plump my pillow a little too forcefully.

"I've picked up on that." _Thwump_, goes the pillow. "As if we didn't just spend days together cooped up in a car."

"Yes, well…" Edward says, scuffing the floor with his shoe. "In a way, being that close to you for so long is easier. While I don't become immune to your scent the longer I'm with you, like a human would, time does make it easier to bear."

"Super," I say abruptly because, at this point, he being able to bear my scent doesn't seem to matter. "Are you going to start your drive after getting your little snack?"

He looks surprised. "That would be rude. I don't want to offend Renee." What does it matter what Renee thinks of him? "I was thinking I would leave tomorrow night."

My stomach drops to my feet. Tomorrow, then. Less than 24 hours to unearth my secret weapon.

Several hours later, I awake blearily in the darkness to see Edward climbing in my bedroom window.

"How were the fish?" I mumble at him, only half awake.

"Actually, it was a seal."

"You clubbed a baby seal?!"

"Shh," he whispers, bending in to give me a kiss on the forehead. As though it's an enchanted kiss, I fall back into the world of dreams. But even in my dreams, I feel a comforting presence nearby, watching over me as I sleep. The person is humming, the same haunting melody that I'd never heard before this week but that I feel like I've known my entire life.

* * *

Our first day in Jacksonville starts off like it's going to be one of those perfect days. The type of day you look back on when you're 80 and refer to as the "Golden Days." The type of day that makes you almost forget that it may be the final one you'll spend with Edward Cullen.

That day, I find out why I've never seen Edward in the sun. Renee is out getting groceries, and he walks to the edge of her covered patio. He stands firmly in the shade, looking at me sitting like a queen on my lawn chair throne in the middle of my grassy kingdom. And yes, I'm sipping a glass of lemonade. The sun draws a line in the concrete between us.

I look at Edward with a fiendish gleam in my eye.

"I dare you," I say, "to step out into the sun." My body is drinking in the warmth, and I feel all toasty and lazy, like I could do anything in the world.

This is what I expect Edward to do: Shake his head and take a small step back to emphasize that he will not comply.

This is what Edward does: Smiles sadly and takes a step forward into the sun.

According to everything I know about vampires, this is the point where I expect Edward's skin to start burning and peeling away from his bones before they, too, pulverize into dust. At the very least, I expect the sun to expose him for what he truly is, the glittering façade stripped away, leaving only gruesome muscle and bone. Perhaps some crawling maggots to emphasize his undead quality.

Instead, his façade starts to glitter all the more. As Edward's pale flesh is exposed to the sun's rays, it explodes into a million facets of light. He walks slowly across the grass, his eyes and body blazing. He stands facing me in the sun, his fiery arms slightly outstretched, palms toward me. Almost like he's saying, "This is me. This is what I am."

I think: Really? Already ridiculously attractive boy becomes even more beautiful in the sun?

Edward has become, metaphorically speaking, the world's largest and most brilliant diamond. Suddenly, I'm re-thinking everything I know about vampires.

Let's consider the symbolism here.

What if, I posit, Edward is not a fiendish vampire at all? Or, rather, if a vampire is not what we think? We've looked long and hard at vampires through the years. But what if a vampire's thirst is not a curse but, rather, the sin that tempts the budding vampire?

Look again.

Shift your focus with me.

The symbolism is so blatant here that it's practically biting me in the neck.

Maybe vampires are nothing more than baby butterflies. Like tadpoles and caterpillars, they go through a journey to grow into their eventual form. They brave the fire of their thirst and emerge on the other side, having made a choice.

Some people might see Edward as a hellish creature, forever branded by the sun so that no one can mistake what he is. So that he can never walk the earth during the day. So that he's relegated to an infinite night.

But I see something else. I see a figure ablaze with the glory of the sun. I see kind golden eyes looking at me. The only thing necessary to complete this picture would be a fiery sword in his hand. I'm sure Edward even has an angelic singing voice with which to regale shepherds watching their flock by night.

Edward is watching my face steadily. I wonder what he's seeing as these impossible thoughts go gallivanting through my mind. I wonder if he knows that he's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. If I were on the fence about Edward's beauty (which I'm not), this sight would certainly have tipped me over the edge.

Now I just need to get him to see what I see.

"You're going to fry," I say.

He smiles a smile that shows all his gleaming teeth.

"No, I won't."

"Well, then you're going to fry _me_. I think you're magnifying the sun's rays in my direction."

"In that case, we should probably get you inside."

Is it wrong of me to be secretly pleased that Edward is protective? Don't tell him. I have a suspicion that you ain't seen nothing yet when it comes to Edward being protective. His personality profile says so.

Is it wrong of me to wish that I could just sit here and admire Edward in the sun forever?

Just now, Renee's octogenarian neighbor dodders out onto his back patio. He looks over at us, smiles a toothless grin, and waves.

Edward waves back.

"Edward!" I hiss, grabbing his arm. "That old dude can totally see that you're sparkling."

"Don't worry. He thinks he sees sparkly people all the time."

* * *

When Renee comes home, Edward and I help her unload the groceries. I watch as he deftly navigates around the sun patches streaming in through the kitchen windows. He subtly points me to where everything goes.

"Mom," I say as I put away the eggs in the frig. "Where do you keep Gran's stuff?"

Edward is leaning up against the counter. He's watching me curiously, as he cannot use Renee's thoughts to clue in on what I'm looking for.

"Hm," she muses. Her voice is muffled because her head is buried in the pantry. "I think most of it is in the attic." She pops her head out and looks at me. "Do you need something in particular?"

Yes.

"No, I'd just like to do some browsing."

Edward and I spend the rest of the afternoon digging through the chaos that is Renee's attic. We find a lot of old things of mine. Edward delights in laughing at pictures of Little Bella.

"I'm not photogenic," I say.

"I disagree."

I hold up a frame of my first day of school. I have an absurdly large grin on my face, the better to expose the gap where my front teeth should have been.

He holds up a picture of his own—the Polaroid of us at prom. I'm surprised he kept it. And even more surprised that he has it with him in his wallet. In the picture, my face is full of promise, my eyes are bright, and my cheeks are tinged with the start of a blush.

We stand for a second holding up our disparate Bella pictures as exhibits A and B. Then I cave and put mine face down on a nearby box.

"Yeah, you have that effect on me," I mumble.

"Are you saying that I bring out your inner beauty?"

"The only thing beautiful about me is my name, thus making it a misnomer. However, I grant that I look like less of a reject in that picture than usual."

In a box full of photo albums, I find what I'm looking for. At the same time, Edward finds a treasure of his own.

"This, I've got to see."

He's holding up a pair of roller blades, relics from my year with my mom. She's always trying new things; blades were the fad that particular year.

"Over my dead body."

"I'm partial to your alive body."

I believe I've explained all about Edward and his superpowered gaze. Needless to say, he coaxes me out on the roller blades after the sun has gone down.

As I remembered, I am as graceful on roller blades as a giraffe is on ice.

However, Edward makes it all worth it. I would have rollerbladed one-footed on a rusty metal railing above a sea of thumb tacks just to feel his hand on my waist as he jogs effortlessly beside me. And to feel his arms tighten around me when I start to fall.

I don't want him to ever let go.

* * *

When we come back inside, I help Renee put the finishing touches on the store-bought dinner. But really, I don't want to eat. Although my stomach feels empty, it's not from hunger. I don't want to spend one of the precious few hours I might have left with Edward in an activity that disgusts him.

Oddly, however, Edward practically pushes me to the dinner table. I expect him to make some sort of excuse, maybe feign illness, to get out of the meal. Instead, he's already sitting at his spot when Renee and I start bringing the food in.

With only a single sidelong glance at me, Edward turns his full attention to Renee. And when I say full attention, you know I mean his superpowered gaze.

As always, he's the epitome of politeness and charm. He peppers Renee with simple questions to get her talking. What she does for fun, what her book club is like, what's the back story of her octogenarian neighbor.

He listens intently, but not to her words. In brief silences, Renee's eyes dart to me as though she knows something is up. She can't quite put a finger on what it is. Maybe she's like me and has devised her own explanation for his unusual eyes.

I want to know what is up as well. I want to know why I'm watching Renee melt into a puddle of chocolate goo at Edward's pretty little feet.

Then Edward asks, "What prompted your move from Arizona?"

I freeze with my forkful of peas halfway to my mouth.

The past. He's asking her about the past.

For once, Renee doesn't dive in to the story. "Oh, I'm sure Bella has told you all about that."

"Actually, as I'm sure you know, getting information out of Bella can be like pulling teeth."

Bingo. That's where he's going with this. And I so don't want him going there.

They laugh; Renee knows exactly what he's talking about. She's always telling me that I need to open up, smile more, spill my guts to total strangers.

When Renee is in the middle of a story about how she met Phil, I speak up for the first time in half an hour.

"Mom," I say," these peas are delicious. What brand are they?"

She looks at me oddly. "I don't remember. Didn't you heat them up?"

Edward doesn't even look at me, although the corner of his mouth turns up as he realizes I've finally caught on. He captures Renee's attention yet again, prompting her to finish her story about how Phil literally swept her off her feet.

In mute horror, I watch Edward verbally circling Renee, he the mountain lion to her lamb. When he somehow directs the conversation to Forks, I'm about half a second from bolting for my room.

Edward notices.

"Bella," he says, the most abrupt transition he's made all evening. "Wasn't there something that you wanted to ask your mom? About Forks?"

And, just like that, I'm front and center in the spotlight of their gazes. My mouth is open, and I'm pretty sure this is what a deer feels like when it comes across a vampire in the woods.

I can think of a million questions I could ask Renee, safe questions about the present and the future and peas. But I know the one that Edward wants me to ask about is the past. He's just spent the last hour setting up everything exactly right, taking his cues from whatever he's picked out of Renee's brain to dig in to the reason why I am the way I am.

He can't read my mind, so he found the next best thing.

Somehow, in less than one day, Edward has managed to rifle through the family closet and pull out _the_ skeleton.

As far as skeletons go, this one is fairly run-of-the-mill. No deep dark specter of murder or abuse that plagues other families. Charlie and Renee still talk to each other after their relatively amicable divorce. And other than his dislike for kids and overlarge ego, Phil was a great guy.

But this one event, it shaped the rest of my life, for good or ill. It's the one thing that Renee and I have never discussed. And she talks to me about everything—school, boys, even Charlie.

But this _thing_ is always there, in the quiet spaces between our conversations. If we even start to set a big toe into dangerous waters, we both voluntarily back away, she a butterfly flitting off in the breeze, me the ostrich plunging my head back into the sand.

Even now, we're sitting stiffly across the table from each other, panic mirroring endlessly in our eyes.

In a single hour, Edward Cullen has discovered the reason why I live in my own head, why I shut myself off from the world, why I think no one could possibly love me.

The easy thing to do—the Bella thing to do—would be to ask any number of witty questions on the tip of my tongue rather than the one I'm having to pull out of the dark corners of my soul.

But the right thing to do is to utter four words.

Four words, that's all. But they are the four most important words I've ever spoken.

"Do you regret leaving?"


	10. Chapter 10: The Last Time

**------------| Type O Negative, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

I don't need to know why Renee left. I don't need to know what prompted the mother of a newborn child to run screaming for the hills sans the child. From the small hints that Charlie has dropped over the years, I have a pretty good idea of _why._

I just needed to know _how._

I needed to know if she looked back. If she stopped in on the crib one last time. If she's missed watching her little girl grow up.

Renee visibly deflates against her chair.

"Oh honey," she breathes, as if this is not the way she expected me to ask the question. As if those four words had left four holes in her heart. "Every day. I've regretted it every day since leaving. But I was depressed and overwhelmed. If I could go back, I'd take you with me. You don't know how many nights I've laid up crying because…"

She continues on, and I'm absorbing it all. I sit, numb and quiet, the tears on my face mirroring Renee's. I hardly notice when Edward clears our plates and retreats to the kitchen.

I wonder: What would life have been like growing up in Arizona? Perhaps I would have been tan.

I wonder: What would life have been like with Renee as a mother? Somehow, I can't picture her—in all her harebrained, erratic glory—filling that role. I can't imagine her sitting still long enough.

"I'm so glad we have a fresh start now," Renee is saying. "I know I can never make it up to you. But I can try. I've even sworn off men."

Perhaps this is because Phil dropped her like a hot potato right after they moved to Jacksonville and he hit the majors.

She prattles on about how I'll have my own bathroom and we can plant a rose garden and go jogging along the beach every day. I think: Roses probably don't grow here. And I can't run.

As she talks, I'm staring at Edward's stiff shoulders as he washes, rinses, repeats at the sink. He's cleaning every prong of every fork. He's giving us space. Time to talk.

He also just sneakily avoided yet another meal.

* * *

After dinner, Renee wants to start our renewed mother/daughter bonding by playing a family board game. While she's setting up, I help Edward finish the dishes by rinsing and drying. Edward is distant, probably in preparation of his departure, so I respond in kind. I don't say anything to him except "You missed a spot." Which, of course, he hasn't.

When I leave him drying the final dish, I walk into the living room, and I see every available surface covered with a smorgasbord of family entertainment for ages 4 and up. Renee has torn into all kinds of previously unopened games and is assembling various pieces and boards. As I wend a circuitous route toward her, I step on several game boards and hear at least one crack.

Renee leans toward me conspiratorially as I arrive at the couch.

"I didn't know men could do dishes," she whispers, her eyes on the kitchen door.

"Edward's part female." His personality profile says so.

Renee nods solemnly as though that's a really good thing. At this point, Edward could probably have got down on all fours and started barking like a dog and Renee would still think he hung the moon.

After all, he'd practically delivered her daughter to her on a silver platter.

I steer Renee in the direction of games that don't require either mental or physical skill. Or secrets, bluffing, or strategy. No reason to give Edward unfair advantage. We settle on Monopoly.

Edward lets Renee win. I can tell, but that's only because I've got his number. I know about his _modus operandi_.

It's exceptionally tricky to let someone else win without cluing them in to what you're doing. Winning fair and square? Exhilarating. Winning because the person opposite you is letting you win? Less so.

Edward pulls off the feat with grace. It's all in the voice and face. Edward is well-endowed in both.

I'm playing, but I'm distracted by an impending confrontation. I own a couple of tiny houses of the cheapest property. I can count the number of paper bills I have on one hand. Edward and Renee are battling for ownership of the ritzy Boardwalk. Edward has a neat, orderly grid of rainbow towers stacked in front of him. Renee's playing space looks like a tornado devastated a couple of paper bill skyscrapers.

I'm looking at Renee and Edward, and they morph into Jacksonville and Forks. In my head, this is what I'm seeing:

Renee—Bright, bubbly, and just a little bit eccentric.

Edward—Dark, stormy, and just a little bit creepy.

I'm thinking: Edward can't _make_ me stay in Jacksonville, can he?

We're about to find out.

* * *

It's getting late, and we're packing up the board game mania. My time is running out. Everything is happening too fast, and I'm off balance. If I pulled my secret weapon out now, I would probably just shoot myself in the foot.

The sneaky boy probably planned it this way.

Now is the socially acceptable time for Edward to announce he's leaving. He can graciously back out, having spent an appropriate amount of time helping reunite the prodigal mother with her daughter.

But he doesn't say anything. He doesn't say anything when Renee announces she's going to bed. Or when Renee hugs me goodnight.

"See how much fun we'll have?" she sighs into my hair. I nod and smile weakly at her.

She grins at Edward and warns, "Don't stay up too late" before disappearing into the back of the house.

With Renee gone, Edward is back to that stiff shoulders thing again. His hands are deep in the pockets of his dark jeans, and I'm reminded of Edward in a diner so impossibly long ago.

"Bella—" he begins. I cut him off. I don't want to hear him say the words. I don't want to hear him say that he's leaving.

I say, "What was that about?"

"What was _what_ about?"

"All those questions for Renee."

He sighs. "Can't you just thank me?"

"No. I don't understand why you'd do something like that a few hours before you leave."

"I care about you."

I lower my eyes to my feet. "Obviously not enough."

"Bella. I care about you so much that I'm willing to leave to keep you safe."

"_Safe_," I snap. "I'm not safe anywhere. If you haven't noticed, I'm currently working on a Master's degree in Bodily Harm. I'm a life-long learner, so I'll probably move on to a Ph.D. next. A change of scenery will not help."

"In fact," I add, "it would be nice to have my own personal savior to catch me when I fall."

I can tell by the storm on his face that he doesn't like this idea. Unlike me, he doesn't consider himself a savior.

"I could just as easily kill you as I could save you," he says darkly. "And besides, Jacksonville is too sunny. I can't stay here."

"No one said anything about Jacksonville. When you leave for Forks, I'm going with you."

Edward is silent for a long moment. Clearly, he hadn't expected this little snag.

Then, "I don't understand. You chose to come to Jacksonville. You knew I'd have to leave."

"Yes, but I don't have to stay when you do."

He blinks. "I know you. You wouldn't do that to Renee. She just got you back."

Now it's my turn to blink rapidly, and I can feel the blood draining from my face.

"Is that the reason you went all Spanish Inquisition on my mom? To make it impossible for me to leave now?"

And here I'm thinking he was doing it just to be the considerate, caring vampire we all know he is. And here he's thinking that dismantling the emotional minefield that is my relationship with my mom will ensure that I leave Forks. That I leave him.

This is me, utterly angry. "Well, your stupid plan won't work. When you leave for Forks, I'm going to be in your car."

His face goes diamond hard. "No, you're not."

"Fine. Then you get to explain to Renee and the neighbors why I'm screaming bloody murder."

"Don't do this." Edward's voice is low, dangerous.

"I _have_ to do this. I can't let you walk away from me. I _can't_."

Surely he has to understand.

But he says, "You don't have a choice."

I feel my body jerk like he's slapped me in the face. His voice is harsh, he's saying these mean things, he's trying to boss me around. I'm hurt, I'm mad, I want to call him out on being such an overprotective, domineering ape.

But he says, "You're not getting in my car. And if you follow me home…" His breath hitches, and he looks away. "If you follow me home, my family and I will leave."

Leave.

Like, _leave_ leave?

My head is spinning. I'm cold. I think I'm going to faint.

He says, "This is the last time you will ever see me."

My knees give out, and I sink to the couch. I see vampire in his face.

I am a fool. I am a fool to think that a vampire would ever change. I am a fool to think that there was anything I could say that would possibly change his mind.

But I can't watch him walk away. I _can't._ I've watched too many other people walk away from me in my life.

This time, he watches _me_ as I get up from the couch and stumble off to my bedroom. I want him to stop me. I want him to reach out and grab my arm as I pass. I want him to catch me if I fall.

But he doesn't.

Instead, he lets me go.

I watch from my bedroom window as a silver Volvo peels rubber in its haste to get out of Jacksonville.


	11. Chapter 11: Overlarge Hot Dog

**------------| Type O Negative, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

I lie curled in the fetal position in the center of a naked bed. My pillows, blankets, and sheets are strewn haphazardly around the floor, where they had fallen after my initial whirlwind of anger.

I want so desperately to scream and cry and beg, but I can't seem to do anything more than lie here and be.

Although I would hardly call it _being_.

I'm empty, like someone has ripped an Edward-sized hole out of my torso, a hole that nothing else can ever fill. I'm incomplete, broken, vacant.

The moon moves across the sky in slow motion. I watch every minute of every hour pass in green neon.

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1:12 a.m.

He said he couldn't say away from me if he tried.

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2:37 a.m.

He lied.

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3:23 a.m.

I never thought I would understand how Romeo and Juliet were willing to kill themselves for lost love.

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4:00 a.m.

Now I do.

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Sometime after 4 o'clock in the morning, I must have dozed off at last.

But I'm alone even in my dreams.

* * *

The smell of bacon is my wake-up call. I open my eyes to see an empty rocking chair lit by only uncharacteristic gloom. Dawn never came this morning, which suits me fine.

I can hear Renee downstairs, talking to herself. She tends to do that, the curse of living alone.

I'm sure I'll eventually develop the habit.

I slide off my bed and onto the floor, trying to decide if I have enough energy to make it downstairs. I want to prolong the inevitable. I don't think I can handle the look on Renee's face when I lie and say that Edward had to leave last night due to a family emergency.

The disappointment on her face will only add fuel to my own.

Instead, I take a long shower. I avoid all strawberry-scented lotions and soaps. I remain under the spray until the hot water cools to an icy cold.

When at last I can think of no other reason to remain hiding in my room, I open my door and step out. I take baby steps down the stairs.

As I round the corner into the kitchen, I find out that Renee isn't talking to herself after all.

She is talking to Edward.

Edward.

Edward.

Edward.

Edward.

Edward.

Edward is sitting and reading the stocks section of the Sunday paper.

And my soul goes supernova. That hole, that wretchedly empty, gaping hole in my chest fills up with the sight of him so quickly that I gasp.

He and Renee look up.

"I see you," I blurt awkwardly into the expectant silence.

"…made breakfast," I add hurriedly when Renee looks curiously at me. "I see you made breakfast."

"Edward did, actually. He's apparently a fabulous cook."

I sit down shakily in front of a plate piled high with a breakfast that Edward has made for me. But I only have eyes for him. I couldn't pry my gaze from his golden eyes if I tried.

Apparently, the owner of those eyes feels the same way.

As Renee flips through her section of the paper, commenting on this or that, Edward and I speak to each other with our eyes.

_You came back_, I say.

_I'm here,_ he says.

"Oh look!" Renee says. "There's a carnival on the board walk today."

My eyes reluctantly shift to a garish ad on the edge of the paper that she's holding out to me. The ad is such a train wreck, I am not in any way enticed to respond.

"We should go," she says.

No, we shouldn't.

But Edward takes one look at the little squares of overcast sky visible through the kitchen windows and agrees.

"Let's meet back here in ten minutes," Renee says. "Bella, you're ready to go, aren't you?" Her voice is a little too bright, and I know it's because of my marathon shower.

Ten minutes.

We have ten minutes before Renee is going to come back.

Edward says, "I hope you don't mind; there are only so many days here we'll be able to spend outside together. I like to take advantage of them when I can."

But my brain is stuck on repeat.

"I see you. You said I wouldn't."

"Yes," he says sheepishly. "I couldn't even make it past the city limits."

I'm stunned, I'm confused, this can't be happening. But I'm glad it is.

"Why didn't you come to me last night?"

He hangs his head. "I didn't think you'd want to see me after the awful things I said."

"Why…" And my voice just kinda breaks. "Why did you come back?"

He scoots closer to me and brushes my cheek with one finger. "Because I realized in the very short time that I tried living without you that I can't."

I know the feeling.

My cheek burns. Everything in me burns. For him.

Right then, Renee comes back, brandishing her umbrella like a fencing foil. "I just love carnivals!"

As we climb into Renee's station wagon, Edward whispers, "We'll talk more later."

Later, I need to know what his presence means for our future.

Now, I reach out and put my hand right by his on the seat, so that our pinky fingers are touching.

We arrive at the carnival, and it's all I can do to get out of the car. I want now to be later.

For a while, we lose ourselves in the crowd, although I'm careful to stay within a few feet of Edward's orbit. Renee works herself into an unparalleled state of excitement as she sees and points to each corny activity designed to suck that money from our pockets.

Eventually, she and Edward settle on one of those games where you pay good money to try and knock down bowling pins with a baseball. If you're lucky, you might win an oversized stuffed animal that you realize later is too big to fit in your car. I'm not playing because I don't play games that are rigged.

When Renee squeals, I don't look over. Instead, I'm distracted by a little girl in a white dress. She's standing in front of a clown with a bouquet of multi-colored balloons. The little girl is holding her mom's hand and is pointing at a balloon.

For a second, the crowd obscures her from my view.

"Bella, Edward just knocked down every pin!" Renee says, but I tune her out because (a) she doesn't really want a response and (b) I'm already intimately familiar with Edward's perfection.

Something about the little girl brings a lump to my throat. Maybe it's the way she's now skipping and holding a bright red balloon in one hand and her mom's hand in the other. Maybe it's the way her father is holding her mom's other hand and looking deep into the woman's eyes. They're like a happy little daisy chain, all smiles and laughter and fresh air.

The girl even has plain brown hair and eyes. Nothing special. No golden-haired, sky-eyed cherub. But she's obviously loved anyway.

They're walking right past us when it happens. Someone in the crowd isn't watching where they're going, and the little girl gets jostled roughly. Her mother is looking the other direction when her child's hand gets ripped from her palm.

In my peripheral vision, I see Edward chucking a baseball at a bowling pin. The pin drops.

In a similar motion, the little girl face-plants into the cement. Her hands are otherwise occupied, so they don't catch her as she falls. The red balloon escapes into the ether. I watch as the father scoops up the now screaming child. I watch as dripping tendrils of blood snake down the left half of her face. Bright red raindrops spatter the girl's white dress.

Head wounds aren't recommended with white dresses.

My eyes wide, I turn and try to distract Edward. But he stiffens and turns toward the little girl like a chicken roasting on a spit. His nostrils are flared, and his eyes are dark. He doesn't even glance at me when I say his name.

I think: No.

He takes a single step toward the child.

I think: Not her.

Given the less than pleasant gleam in Edward's eye, I'm sure you can understand what I do next.

I stumble two paces to the nearest concession stand and grab the first thing I can find. Perfect—a two-pronged hot dog skewer.

I look back at Edward. Despite himself, he's taken another step toward the little girl. His body is fighting an internal battle, but I can see it's losing.

Maybe I've been wrong all along.

Maybe he's going to be the one to prove to me that he's dangerous after all.

But not with that little girl as his test subject.

I take a deep breath and stab the inside of my forearm like it's an overlarge hot dog. Now I know what those poor weenies feel like. It goes something like this:

Well. That's a bit…uncomfortable. Perhaps a touch painful. Not something I want to have happen often…

Holy#footingcaucus! MY ARM IS ON FIRE OF A THOUSAND HELLS

I think I hit a nerve. Literally.

As Edward turns to face me, the skewer drops from my fingers and clatters on the asphalt.

"I won a teddy bear!" Renee shrieks in delight, her back still to us.

Edward and I stand facing off like two Old West duelers. He's in full predator mode, and it's all I can do to look calmly at him and ignore the stabbing pains in my arm.

I think: This is going well. Statue Edward is better than Stalker Edward any day.

I may be getting a smidge loopy from the feel of something wet and sticky dripping down my palm. Try as I might to pretend I don't know what it is, my overachieving stomach is getting woozy in anticipation. Of all the parts of me to be like Edward, it would have to be my stomach.

Renee goes, "Which bear should I get?"

The hot dog man goes, "That's not a proper use for that utensil."

I blink, and a black-eyed fiend goes, "You really shouldn't have done that." He's suddenly standing very close, and I can see a tiny, pale Bella reflected in the darkness of his eyes.

The merest whisper: "I trust you."

The fiend goes, "Don't."

Hello darkness, my old friend.

As my old friend claims me, I realize I'm the worst vampire sidekick in the world. I spend more time passed out at the sight of blood than I do coming up with solutions to tricky situations.

Maybe Edward and I won't get that later after all.


	12. Chapter 12: Secret weapon

**------------| Type O Negative, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

I wake up to the feel of wind in my face. For a second, I think that perhaps Edward is spiriting me off somewhere. For a second, my traitorous thoughts suspect that he is running me to somewhere private so he can finish what I'd started.

And I don't even care, as long as I'm with Edward. He can take me and ravish me and I'll die happy.

Then I hear Renee somewhere nearby. As my awareness spreads beyond the bubble of my own body, I realize that I'm in the station wagon, and it's booking down the highway—probably toward the hospital—as fast as its little wheels will take it. Renee is driving, spewing a steady stream of concern. And Edward is…

I sit up to get a better view.

Yes, I am seeing correctly. Edward is sitting in the front passenger's seat.

With his head out the window.

Renee sees my head appear in the rearview mirror.

"Bella! Bella, are you alright?"

Everybody say it with me now: "I'm fine."

Fine fine fine fine. Better than fine, actually. I'm still here. And Edward is still here. It doesn't get any better than that. Now that my imminent danger has passed, Renee's worry quickly morphs into anger.

"How in the world did you manage to stab yourself at a carnival?"

As if the location matters when it comes to me stabbing myself.

"I found myself on the wrong end of a hotdog skewer."

"A hot dog skewer?!" She twists to look at me, then down at my arm. "What were you thinking?"

I don't follow her gaze. Instead, I watch as the little station wagon veers off to the right.

"I, uh, missed my hot dog?" I say lamely.

Just before we hit the rumble strip on the highway, Edward's left arm shoots out to steady the wheel. Consider the irony of the vampire taking the time to prevent our car from flipping while he's simultaneously fighting to save me from himself.

I'm in double jeopardy, and he's all double salvation.

Renee doesn't notice; she's gone into full panic mode.

"How did you miss your hot dog? Why were you using a hot dog skewer? Why were you eating a hot dog after Edward's wonderful breakfast? And why is your boyfriend hanging out the window of my car?"

I focus on the easiest question to answer. And I focus on answering it calmly. You know that thing about people responding to your tone of voice in kind? It works wonders with Renee.

"He's allergic to blood."

I glance over, and Edward is staring stonily into the wind, his immobile body a stark contrast to his wildly undulating hair. I don't even see him blink. Before Renee can repeat any of the questions to which I don't have good answers, I distract her.

This is me, the epitome of calm: "Mom, do you still carry band-aids in your glove compartment?"

"Oh yes! Silly me!" She turns her attention back to the front. "I'll bet there are some still in there. Although probably expired."

Do band-aids even expire? I hadn't kept any around long enough to find out.

"Allow me," Edward says to Renee before she starts to reach, which he knows will further impede her ability to keep the station wagon on the right side of the road. Renee doesn't know him well enough to detect the hint of strain in his smooth voice, but I do. I watch as his fingers pop the hatch and unerringly pull out two band-aids from the stack of paper even though he glances down only once.

Our fingers brush as he hands them over his shoulder to me, and he pulls away immediately. We need to get him out of this car.

"Mom, can we just go home?"

She shifts to look at me again. "Are you sure?"

"Yes. It's just a minor puncture wound."

"Well…" she looks doubtful, but my vocal calming technique is starting to work.

"Seriously. This doesn't require anything more than first aid. And maybe a towel."

Immediately, Edward shrugs out of his over shirt and tosses it at me. As I unfold the crumpled wad, I notice that the shirt already has some of my blood on the sleeve.

Which means that Edward probably carried me to the car.

My head was probably on his shoulder.

My neck was probably exposed to his teeth.

My blood was definitely dripping on his arm.

I keep giving him ample opportunities to kill me.

And yet I keep waking up.

Surely he's got to see that this means something.

When we arrive back at the little blue house, Edward shuts his door fiercely and disappears. Renee and I follow more slowly. She hovers, helping me out of the car, helping me press the shirt to my arm, guiding me by the elbow to the front porch.

We walk past the living room, and I see Edward lying with his back to me on the couch, covered in a white sheet. I've never seen him lying down before. Probably not a good sign.

I draw the line at Renee helping me up the stairs like an invalid.

"I'm going to go clean up," I say, and when she hesitates, I add, "Check on me later?"

After I rinse the blood off my arm, I start the process of assembling my mutilated bedding. Renee pops her head in to check on me, as promised, and I remove all doubt from her mind about the severity of my injury by showing her the small, circular band-aids I had found underneath the sink.

Evenly spaced, they make me look like I was bitten by a vampire.

"There was so much blood," she says. "I can hardly believe it all came from that."

I nod because blood will do that to people. Make them see red, make them think that something is worse than it actually is.

When I'm finally able to shoo her out of my room with the pretense of being tired, I sit and wait for Edward. I wonder if he's going to come. I wonder if he's still fighting to control himself. I wonder if we're going to spend yet another night in Jacksonville apart.

If he doesn't come to me, I will go find him.

This time, I have something to tell him.

A story, it's the only thing I can give him.

Then I blink, and my door is clicking closed against his back. We stare into each other's eyes for a second. His eyes are as dark as mine.

He says, "As if the universe weren't already out to get you, you have to go and stab yourself in front of a vampire."

His voice is hard, but I can't tell if that's from thirst or anger. Probably both.

So I keep it light. "Just trying to get your attention. Did it work?"

"Quite."

"You should know that I stab myself all the time. Pencils, forks, fences, croquet mallets, you name it. The odds were in favor of a hot dog skewer."

He doesn't smile. "What in the world did you think you were doing?"

His face is so fierce, and he's towering above me, so my voice is small.

"Saving the little girl…?"

"From what?" His jaw clenches. "Did you honestly think I'd take her in front of all those people?"

"I don't know. You were stalking toward her."

Edward rolls his eyes. "To offer her father a medical course of action. I have two medical degrees; the least I can do is put them to good use."

"Oh."

"Yes, oh. I wasn't going to touch her."

"Your nostrils were flared; what was I supposed to think?"

"You weren't supposed to think…I would never…" He stops, at a loss for words.

Then, "Bella, I could have killed you."

"Yet you didn't. Again."

Abruptly, he stalks to my dresser, lithely jumps to sit on it, and presses his palms against his eyes.

"I can't keep doing this to you."

"Doing what? Saving me?"

"No. Risking your life."

I pause for a second.

This is it.

"If I can prove to you that you've done nothing but save me, even in your darkest of days, will you stop agonizing every time something less than ideal happens to me?"

He contemplates this for a second.

"No, probably not." But I can see a small smile begging for release. He likes me feisty. He likes it when I stand up for myself. When I stand up to him.

With a small smile of my own, I reach for the little leather journal currently sitting on my night stand. The same little leather journal that I pulled from a box in Renee's attic. I am going to use this little leather journal to prove to him, once and for all, that I'm alive because of him. To start his healing process.

I feel like I've done nothing but take from him. He helped me get out of Forks. He helped heal my relationship with my mom. He's saved my life on multiple occasions now, including one involving roller blades and stairs that I might have failed to mention earlier.

And, despite how much it pained me, he was even willing to leave to keep me safe.

It's the sidekick's turn to finally pull out that secret weapon and save the superhero for a change. Like many superheroes, what Edward needs more than anything in the world is freedom from guilt.

Guilt is probably the sorriest excuse for an emotion there is. If guilt were a person, it would be the puny know-it-all in fourth grade with glasses, braces, and a ready finger waggling in your face. Unlike other emotions—love, hate, fear—guilt gives you nothing. It only takes. It takes your confidence, your time, and the health of your relationships.

Convincing a 108-year-old vampire that he shouldn't feel guilty for his ruby eyes several decades ago will be tricky. But I am motivated. I am selfish. I want Edward to get over his guilt so he can get on with loving me already.

"What is your greatest regret?" I ask.

As I knew he would, Edward answers, "Ruby eyes."

Look at me not even having to read his mind to know his answer.

"Although a close second would be leaving you last night."

My heart does a little dance, but I need to focus.

I say, "You've told me your life's story. You've told me about ruby eyes. Now let me tell you mine."

I reach over and re-position Gran's journal in my lap.

"This," I say, "you gotta hear."

He listens as I tell him my own personal recipe for pre-teen angst.

It goes like this: Start with a socially inept single father who is baffled by the increasing demands of the female world. Combine with an ADD mother who is properly doting on her newfound daughter—until she moves onto the next pet project. Add a boyfriend named Phil who regularly drops hints about his dislike for kids. Strain out any defense on my part by Renee. Sprinkle in my first crush, a tanned, athletic seventh grader named Taylor who had a big smile for me until he realized that no, I wasn't actually friends with Tanya, the real object of his affection.

Put all of the above into a blender and punch the heck out of that button. You're left with the pulped mess that was my sixth-grade heart.

My silver lining that year was Renee's mom, my Gran. On the outside, she was a hard woman with a gravelly voice. On the inside, she was a melted marshmallow who could spin a yarn like no other with said voice.

When I was feeling particularly down, Gran told me a story that's stuck with me the rest of my life. I'd gone to visit her in the hospital. Like me, she was well-acquainted with the institution.

This story didn't have the same timbre as many of the others she'd told me. I didn't know it at the time, but it was the last story she would tell me. Unlike her other stories, it didn't involve dragons or unicorns.

But it did involve a superhero.

This is how it went: Gran was accompanying her new husband on a business trip to Chicago. She was walking from their hotel to meet him at a nearby restaurant when she was mugged at gunpoint. The mugger dragged her to an alley and demanded her purse.

When she didn't respond quickly enough, he raised his gun and fired.

But the bullet never reached her.

A dark shape stepped in front of her and knocked her to the ground just as the gun went off. The mugger was gone, and she never saw him again. The dark person in front of her turned to reveal a youthful face.

His features shimmered in the light of the fading sun.

I say, "Gran left this journal to me when she died a few months later."

I say, "In it, she wrote about that day in Chicago."

Beside me, Edward is completely still. He's not breathing.

I creak open the leather and turn to the page I know by heart. "_White as snow, he was, with dark eyes_."

"I remember," Edward breaks in at last. His voice is very soft. "She smelled a little like you."

I continue reading, "_I could see kindness in his face when he looked down at me_."

Edward's eyes are gazing into the past. "I took her hand and helped her up."

"_He said_—"

"You're safe now. Go home and live," Edward whispers.

His bright eyes shift slowly to meet mine.

"She was pregnant," I say.

"Two heartbeats," he agrees.

"Renee's heartbeat."

Edward shoves himself off the dresser. He starts pacing like a caged animal in front of my small window. I don't know if it's because he's frustrated at where I'm going with this or because he almost never knew me at all.

"So you see," I say in a small voice, "you're not a monster. You saved me before you even knew me. I'm alive…no…I _exist_ because of you."

Edward thrusts his hand abruptly into a patch of moonlight. His fingers gleam faintly, only a fraction of their luminescence in the sun.

"I saved your Gran by killing someone else," he nearly snarls at me. "This is the skin of a killer."

"No, it's the skin of someone with a choice."

He's incredulous, but he listens as I tell him the theory I came up with after seeing him in the sun. What if, I posit, vampires are the caterpillars, the tadpoles of the otherworldly realm? They are nascent beings destined to grow into one of two things:

(1) Golden-eyed saviors

(2) Ruby-eyed destroyers

We have names for these two archetypes. They're called angels and devils.

When faced with the temptation of human blood, vampires have a choice to make.

Choose death, and you follow a red-eyed, horned-tail fiend into the fiery pit. You spend the rest of eternity feeding on the bodies and souls of hapless humans.

Choose life, and you sparkle in the sunlight. You save girls from pool fences and hot dog skewers. You make announcements to pregnant virgins and poor shepherds. You may even get to guard the world's ultimate secret garden with an awesome flaming sword.

I'm talking Michael and Gabriel.

Edward is immutable as stone as I talk. He's framed in the window, and the light from the moon is casting an ethereal glow around him.

If only he could see what I see right now.

I've never argued more animatedly in my life. I'm gesturing wildly with my hands, and I'm bouncing slightly on the bed. I want so badly to reach out and pull him to me, but he's not ready to be touched.

I say, "Because of my Gran's story, I've believed in someone like you my whole life."

I say, "I'm alive because of you. I've _lived_ because of you. The things you did for your ruby eyes were horrible, yes. But if you hadn't done them, we would never have met."

I grow quiet and still, and Edward just looks at me for a long time as only vampires can do. For the first time since entering my room this night, he sits down with me on the bed. I take this to be a good sign.

Finally, he takes a shaky breath and says, "Carlisle will love you."

I blink.

I didn't expect this to be so easy.

"And I will never run from you again," he says.

"Or lie?"

"Or lie."

"Even for my own good?"

"Even for your own good."

Edward lowers his head to look at his fingers. They're picking at a thread of my blanket.

"I never did want you to stay in Jacksonville," he says quietly.

"I know." Inside, my insides are warm like a toaster oven.

"But I don't know if I can control myself."

"You can."

"How?" he sighs.

"You choose. Every day. Every second, minute, and hour of every day. You're stronger than you think."

Edward is still solemn. "Despite what you might think, I'm not perfect."

"No, you're not perfect," I say even though I've seen much evidence to the contrary. "But you're perfect for me."

He stops picking at the blanket and instead threads his fingers through mine.

"I don't deserve you."

"You deserve everything."

"I've done bad things."

"Now you do good ones. You've chosen life," I repeat.

"I choose you," he says. "You are my life."

It's a declaration and a promise and a future all wrapped up into one.

Vampires, I can see them mating for life.

* * *

Renee doesn't hide her disappointment when I tell her that I'm going back to Forks with Edward. Oddly, though she's not surprised. She's watched me and Edward together. She knows the signs. She probably knows better than I do.

I soften the blow by promising that I'll come visit more often. She doesn't ask me to; I volunteer. That's how you know I mean it.

As Edward loads up the car, Renee hugs me tightly.

"He looks like he'd step in front of a bullet for you," she says.

I smile because, in a way, he already did.

"He's a keeper," she adds.

We turn and watch him finish loading the bags.

"I know," I say, to both of them.

Edward smiles his little half-smile as he closes the trunk.

"And Bella," she says as I turn to leave, "I hope you're being safe."

Edward's little half-smile grows sad.

I say firmly, "I've never been more safe in my life."


	13. Chapter 13: Meadow Monday

**------------| Type O Negative, **_continued_** |------------**

* * *

The road trip back to Forks—to home—is longer than the first road trip. We stop at various scenic outlooks to work on desensitizing Edward.

To me.

If you know what I mean.

I repeat: Keep it PG, kiddos.

The road trip also takes longer because Edward tries to teach me how to drive the stick shift on his fancy foreign car. I'm vaguely familiar with the concept of a clutch; Nellie has a clutch, but it's mostly for show. I rarely drive faster than 10 mph around town anyway.

Like its owner, the Silver Bullet is fiendish. Its clutch requires just the right application of pressure at exactly the right time. If you don't do exactly what the Silver Bullet needs, you're rewarded with an engine fail.

As I find out.

Repeatedly.

I've dubbed Edward's car the Silver Bullet because the name smacks of speed and the mystical. When I announce the name to Edward, he frowns.

"Do we really have to go with a werewolf reference?"

"Do you have something against werewolves?"

"Well, they're kinda my mortal enemies."

I blink as I digest the fact that werewolves actually exist.

"And they smell bad."

I wonder if wizards exist and, if so, what they smell like.

"Would you prefer 'Hi, Ho, Silver'?" I say.

"Not really."

"That's probably good. You wouldn't want to give my dad the impression you're driving around in a drug-dealing pimpmobile."

Edward agrees to the werewolf reference when I remind him that silver bullets kill werewolves. He continues teaching me how to shoot his own Silver Bullet. An hour later, I've finally gotten the Volvo consistently over 30 mph. Luckily, I'm with the world's most patient creature. He's got all the time in the world, and then some.

Two hours later, Edward's looking at the speedometer out of the corner of his eye.

"You might want to slow down."

When a vampire asks you to slow down, you know that's something. I've never driven over 60 mph (Nellie's limit) and so have never previously seen the appeal.

Now I understand.

There's something very liberating about speeding away from your past and toward your future.

* * *

The next week, we're back in Forks. The usual.

We're in Spanish, and Mrs. Goff is late. You know what that means: spirit animal roll call. I'd started this in eighth grade as a joke. We girls like animals and all that. But it really caught on. Through the years, we'd come up with some really great animals. If we had a zoology class at this school, we'd all ace.

I clear my throat.

"Roll call," I say loudly.

All non-essential conversation ceases.

Without looking, I can name each person by the animal they choose.

"Zebu." Mike Newton. He always goes first. He is my biggest roll call groupie.

"Tarantula." Tyler.

"Kitty cat." Jessica. She's always some sort of cat, usually one of the following: kitty cat, cutie cat, or cuddly cat.

"Unicorn." Freshman girl who is ridiculously good at Spanish.

"Penguin." Freshman boy who is ridiculously good at Spanish.

"Thestral." Band nerd with a Harry Potter fetish.

"Ewok." Star Wars geek.

"Tribble." Star Trek geek.

"Rock." A little slow.

"Mountain lion." Edward. My heart skips a beat at his voice. He still does this to me. I can just see his deliciously imperfect grin.

My turn. "Pigmy goat."

And we finish out strong: "Go team!"

Despite appearances, this exercise is not pointless.

High school changes people, pushes them apart into their little groups, and generally does whatever else necessary to ensure that a group of spirit animals who have been roll-calling since middle school end up alone and miserable.

But when you're down, a good roll call is often the cure. It reassures you you're not alone. That you're part of a team working toward the same goal. That you have a sense of humor. That you can, in fact, use it to laugh. And that no, you're not the only crazy one out there.

Crazy people unite. Roll call loud and proud.

As Mrs. Goff walks in the room, flustered because she's late, someone leans forward in the chair behind me. I hear the creak of the chair and feel a presence uncomfortably close to my left ear. Like my ear is burning with the pressure of it.

"I eat pigmy goats for breakfast."

Rats. So much for my schpiel about team work. It's counterproductive if one of the spirit animals goes on a killing spree. Not, of course, that Edward would ever do such a thing.

As I'm sure I've demonstrated.

Repeatedly.

* * *

It's Monday—the first Monday of the rest of my life—and Edward and I are in a meadow near Forks, bathed in sunlight. We must have bottled some of it up in the Silver Bullet and brought it with us from Jacksonville.

School's out now. Charlie has finally released me from my month-long house arrest after he found out that I'd gone on a two-week road trip with a boy.

I think: If this Monday were a person, the first thing it would do is kick off its shoes and dance barefoot through the summer grass.

I think: If this Monday were a feeling, it would be joy. Like the way I'm feeling now in Edward's arms.

I'm sitting with my back against his solid chest. Our bare feet tangle in the grass in front of us. I may have finally confirmed something to him about pinky toes. He's taking full advantage of my, um, interest.

I could get used to these Mondays. I would call them Meadow Mondays and ensure that they happen at least once a week.

"You know what would make this Monday even more perfect?" I say.

Edward doesn't respond immediately. This is okay because it feels like a slow kind of day.

"What?"

Oddly, Edward is chewing on a piece of grass. I think he's trying to get in the moment.

"Bite me. No way you get to play Angel Gabriel without me."

Edward just laughs. He plucks a dandelion from the grass and twirls it around. Little dandelion fronds dance off in the breeze. He laughs, but I can see he's seriously considering my request.

Helpfully, I lean my head back. I raise my throat to the atypically blue sky. Edward growls at the sight of my exposed jugular. His growl vibrates across my back.

But, being the sneaky—and romantic—boy he is, he merely leans down and kisses my neck. Carefully and chastely.

I can see he's going to take some convincing.

I can see he's going to take some persuading.

Not to worry.

Knowing me, I'm sure I can arrange a near-fatal accident or two that will hasten my conversion. Perhaps something involving a motorcycle. Or cliff diving into water an absurdly far distance below. Or—and this is my best idea yet—perhaps I could impregnate myself with a half-vampire baby who will bite its way out of my belly and sever my spine in the process.

Nah, scratch that last one. It sounds morbid. And painful.

Edward is leery of the gleam in my eye. As usual, he doesn't know what it means. As usual, the gleam is suspect. Smart boy. If I've learned anything through all this, it's that gleams in eyes are not to be trusted. That eyes themselves can be deceiving.

That eyes can signify golden-eyed superheroes or ruby-eyed villains. That vampires are nothing more than glorified caterpillars. And that you, too, young caterpillar, have a choice to make. If you're smart, you'll choose life.

Like me.

"Can you kill me now?" I say in my best imitation of the Verizon commercial dude. "Good."

Edward just throws back his sparkling head and laughs into the sun.

**

* * *

**

Author's note:

How amazingly appropriate that the final chapter is 13—an excellent homage to Bella's birthday...and the fact that the real meadow scene happens in Chapter 13 as well. Just wanted you all to know that I popped your reviews like pills in attempt to get all these chapters finalized in a single weekend. Any time I was feeling discouraged because something wasn't coming out quite right, your kind words kept me going like none other. So thank you! 


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